Prayer Changes The Scenery

The eternal and essential truth–until we love a thing in all its ugliness we cannot make it beautiful. ~G.K. Chesterton.

The View From Above

Beauty is seldom left alone.

Even here, on this crisp December day, San Francisco Bay grandeur arrayed below, I notice broken booze bottles and evidence of furtive, illegal acts at my feet. The sad truth grips me–there is no vista in this world untouched by human hubris and shame. There is litter on Mt. Everest, plastic floating on the furthest reaches of the sea.

I’m struggling inside for the cause of beauty.

The streets below, laid out in a precise grid, could tell a thousand tales of heartache and cruelty, of windows opening on empty futures.

I can’t pretend.

Truth, beauty and goodness must be examined in their context, un-cheapened by shallow sentiment or denial, or I refuse to believe they exist at all.

I pace in silence, begging God to fit me with new lenses to see what can’t be seen. How grace can exist side by side with the foul and emerge unsullied. How love and hatred can boil in the same stew and love still remain pure. How joy can live under the same roof with pain and still refuse to be silenced.

Prayer Makes Beauty

Do you pray? Do you sit, closed eyes peering through the malodorous vapor of ill-winds and poisonous lies and refuse to blink until your vision is restored?

Do you watch, alert for the first hint of light, and listen for the gentle song of Love that permeates the universe beyond the noise? Are you the one, in the early morning hours, lifting your head, sniffing for a scent, reaching to touch treasures just beyond your grasp?

Do you refuse to believe that what you can see is all there is? Have you held tight the hope that something higher, something powerful, someone with unstoppable purpose is wending his way through our years, our fears and tears?

Have you lifted the ugliness of the world–the people, the painful, the pitiful–to God in prayer, convinced that beauty will prevail, that goodness will never be snuffed out by evil?

If your answer is yes, thank you. You are saving the world. You are saving me.

The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. James 5:16

May God bless you with beauty this New Year. I am spending a few days away from my blog–see you next week!