This is Beauty Abandoned

The other day I was at work. I work at Pal's, a quick-service, drive-through, better-than-McDonald's restaurant. I was on sandwiches, which is, in my perspective, the most . . . big station. There's just so much to be done at the sandwich station, so when it gets busy there are often two people on the station: one to drop buns into the toaster and help keep things stocked, and the other to make the sandwiches themselves. I started the shift dropping buns for a nice girl named Misha. Everything was going well: we were working excellently as a team and I was getting slightly better at the actual making of the sandwiches.

Break time for Misha.

In the thirty minutes that followed, I struggled to get through each burger, dropping buns when I could, and dwindling the stock down to nothing. By the time Misha returned, lettuce was lying all over the place, there were onions in the tomatoes, and there was no cheese, buns, chicken, or pickles. I gave Misha my best puppy dog eyes, but to no avail. "Man this place was beautiful when I left it. I worked so hard to get it clean."

Beauty cannot endure without its creator.

Beauty may be able to survive, hanging on by a thread, but never will it flourish. The creator is the one who knows what's best for the beauty. The creator cares, and knows how to care better than anyone else in the world. The creator knows the beauty's inner workings.

Take for example . . . a work of art. The creator will cherish it, take care of it, love it. Like no one else, the artist will treat its creation like a king (figuratively of course), until that creation "expires" or a new, better, more efficient creation overtakes the old.

We are God's creation.

Here's the special part though: God never gets tired of us, He never leaves us for something better. The only problem is that God is love, thus He does not desire to force us to love Him. It's not in His nature, it's not who He is. True love cannot be forced. So God gave us a choice. When we remain in God's hands he will treat us right. He knows; He created us. Although life may not be easier, God will care for us, love us, make us better. And that process sometimes is hard.

So the choice. We can remain in God's eternal care, or we can abandon His love. We can turn our back on Him. We can take the wide, easy road. The "cool" path. There are so many ways we can be tempted toward this road. So many ways we can get tripped up, and fall down the cliff onto the wide path. And certainly, it seems easier.

We are beauty. We are beauty that will never be the victim of our Creator's abandonment. But we can abandon Him if we're not careful.

Are you beauty abandoned?

Of Beauty and Invasion

CAUTION: Slippery When Wet.

It took me forever to find this spot. It was a rather painful forever, too. I am sitting among swarms of mosquitos in a seat molded perfectly for me at a place called blue hole. It is so named for the clear blue natural swimming hole that rests in the middle of a series of cascades tucked away in an obscure little creek near Elizabethton, TN. You should absolutely go. But when you come, bring a large team of volunteers and a lot of trash bags. As I look around I see the brutal conflict between the beauty of God's creation and the carelessness of mankind. This place at one point would have been a beautiful, undisturbed place of solitude; a place hiddeninsignificance. Insignificant because of how hidden it is, but also significant because of how insignificant it is.

First, I would assume, came the wilderness hikers. They came home and told everyone they knew about this beautiful place, and then there was a road. For the sake of all the lazy people who would only want to see it if it was accessible, the road was built almost right up to the falls themselves, only separated by a beautifully large rock. Soon after the road was built, the careless came. Now, looking around at the beauty and magnificence around me, I have to try to see around the beer cans, socks, pop bottles, and carloads of people. This is not to say that I am not enjoying myself. I've experienced a lot in the last hour or so. From dangling my legs off a 40 foot sheer rock face to helping a struggling inch-long bee out of the water to simply admiring the beauty of the waterfalls and the trees and the . . . bigness. Our God is an incredibly huge, but still expressively intricate creator. Stars flow from his mouth, yet he knit us together cell by cell. God's awesomeness never ceases to amaze me. Sometimes it passes to the back of my mind, but anytime I think of creation, I am zapped with a new burst of awe.

I think what I have discovered through my thoughts about this is that true beauty is not available to everyone. The truest and most magnificent beauty is hidden the deepest. Anytime beauty becomes easily accesible, it is destroyed. Think of all the movie stars, supermodels, musicians. . . . Very shortly after a new beauty is discovered and turned to the public, their life falls apart. Even the local beauties suffer. By the time they are ready to marry, they've been through so many failed relationships that they don't want to marry. They fear commitment because they have been used too often. All of this is just a reinforcement for the scripture in 1 Samuel: "for God sees not as a man sees, for a man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart." If God looks at the heart, then surely He focuses most of his care and love and beauty on the heart. Outwardly beauty is wonderful; I believe we were made to appreciate things that were pleasing to our eyes. But to find real beauty--true beauty--deep beauty, we must push through the brush and struggle through the wilderness. Beauty wants--needs--to be discovered; and once you arrive there, it is an incredible thing.

Beauty is worth fighting for.