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Recently a friend of mine made a statement that has really stuck with me. My friend serves as a missionary on a Pacific Island, and one day recently she had a chance to go to some places she hadn’t visited before. Some of the sights she saw caused her to comment, “It was so beautiful it almost seemed fake.”
I immediately knew exactly what she meant. There is a beauty that we all long for – a beauty that we can picture in the deepest corners of our imagination. A purity to nature. A sense of being surrounded by something so breathtaking that we can’t even take it all in. But, the truth is we rarely see such beauty. Now and then we catch glimpses of it, true, but sin’s grip on nature itself has caused the beauty of this earth to fade more and more with the passage of time.
So, sometimes we try to recreate it. We see it on movies. We see it in man-made segments of “paradise” created just to be breathtakingly beautiful. It’s amazing. It’s wonderful. It appeals to our hunger for beauty – our sense that yes, this is what perfect beauty in nature should look like. But we know it didn’t occur naturally – it was pieces of the best of the best from here and there brought together in one place to create such beauty. We have become so accustomed to such man-made paradise scenes that in those rare moments when we step into a world of true, natural beauty, it’s hard to fathom that it is truly real.
As real beauty becomes so rare, it’s hard to remember that the true perfection of nature is the pattern from which we copy our man-made attempts at beauty. What reminds us of the fake is truly the original, for it was created by God Himself!
I’m not sure there is a great or thoughtful point to this post other than the random flow of thoughts that filled my mind as I read my friend’s comment. But I do know this – my heart longs for that beauty. And, it is thrilling to know that while I would someday love to journey to the Solomon Islands and visit some of that beauty with my friend, there will come a day when I won’t have to journey anywhere to see it. The true beauty will be all around me. It will be immense. It will be amazing. It will be breathtaking. It will be more real than anything I have ever know. And it will be my home for eternity. Now that’s a beauty worth waiting for!
Not Quite Ordinary 