Beauty in the Darkness
There is glory and beauty in the darkness, could we but see!
And to see, we have only to look. -Fra Giovanni, 1513
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Here at our house, we’re in the home stretch of the marathon that is summer. Our oldest son begins middle school Monday morning.
Each year I feel the need to pack everything we haven’t conquered over the summer into this last week—today it was the Adventure Science Center and Sonic Happy Hour, followed by some impromptu Rockband, which was not on the schedule but won hands-down. We’re worn out, and it’s Tuesday. If summer didn’t feel like a marathon before this week, it does now.
Last night I found this piece that I wrote on a Tuesday in February 2014; I didn’t add writing to the summer bucket list.
Tonight I’m praying for reminders to stop and breathe in the beauty of my kids and for eyes to see the holy hidden inside the mundane.
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A wish of mine came true today. In tired frustration this weekend, I told my husband that I wished I could just escape life like a sick friend was doing. And today I woke up sick, so much so, that my husband had to completely take over the doing of life, which is full here.
The sounds of the boys not getting ready for bed, too loud for their sleeping sister, infuriate me, but at a distance tonight, I heard their beauty.
The sounds of the putting on of ballet clothes this afternoon, usually an act accompanied by the gnashing of teeth as the toe seam is just off, were beautiful.
The sounds of our small group locking cars and talking down the driveway as they came in for the night. Beauty past the pain.
There is glory and beauty in the mundane, in those things I see as chores too often. There is beauty there because God is there, in our midst: in the laughing of my sons, in their stomping and roughhousing, in the singing and play-acting of my daughter, in her conversations with my husband, in the doing of homework. Though I needed the distance, the escape, to see it, let me fight to find that beauty when I am standing in the midst of it.
