Beauty. For so many women it is food for the soul---our inner beings long for it, but it is so often lost or forgotten in the midst of the mundane. Many times we don't even realize that we are missing it until we come across some small remembrance. Maybe a scene in nature, maybe the curve of your little ones' cheek while they sleep, often it is music. Sometimes it can be a simple scent that will take our minds and hearts to a different place.
While I dream of having a beautiful home, the reality is that it is a cramped conglomeration of odds, ends, papers and pens and mostly broken toys. My mind is so focused on that next load of laundry and that child's stubborn resistance to my teaching that I forget to connect with that other side of me. There was a time that I felt much more connected to that beauty loving soul within. Was it motherhood, or the continual stream of losses accumulating in my life that separated me from that other me?
I believe we are programmed as women to become task oriented. To focus on accomplishing our chores. We work, sometimes we slave, and then it all comes crashing down when we lose the control we have been working so hard to maintain. Some poor, unsuspecting soul steps into our path at precisely the wrong moment, and all of our pent up emotions come bursting forth. Too often that soul is one to which we should be giving our best---one of our beautiful children or the man we call husband. What follows is often difficult and almost always results in pain. It becomes so easy to blame anyone and anything for all the things that are wrong in our lives.
Wait. What if it is us? What if that desire in our souls for beauty is that special part of us placed there by our Creator? What if He made us to need beauty much like we need food or sleep. Yes, women do need to have servants' hearts. Yes, we are responsible for so much. But what if we take time to nurture that beauty seed in our hearts? Our husbands and our children cannot do this for us. I think that our Great Creator has more in mind for us than a quick verse and "help me" prayer each day. He has filled our world with His artistry, and He expects us to breathe it in and be strengthened by it. By His Word, yes. But why must we categorize our lives into practical and impractical? Why do we look on the practical as "that better part"? As Jesus told Martha in regards to her acts of service---not that they weren't needed, but that there was something better. Mary chose the better part---having her soul fed by her dear Jesus.
If tomorrow we look for the beautiful, enjoy it, and thank our Creator for it, will we then be less equipped for the jobs at hand? My beauty-starved soul shouts out, "No! For then I will be nourished and ready to give my best out to those who are so dear." May I look for and allow myself beauty, and may I pass it on to my family and others who may come my way.
"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness neither shadow of turning." James 1:17
"One thing have I desired of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to enquire in his temple." Psalm 27:4
We should be looking with anxious anticipation for that day when we will live in that beautiful house of the LORD forever. Perhaps we have been created with the ability to feel and appreciate beauty so that we might look forward to an eternity of having our souls full to overflowing with the beauty that we cannot now even comprehend. Maybe all of these other remembrances we have here are just tiny glimpses of what will be beauty eternal.
Thank-You, Heavenly Father for the beauty you bring into my life each day. Let me be nourished and strengthened by this gift from you. And let me not be ashamed to nourish a need in me that was planted there by Your loving hand.
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