When life isn’t beautiful by worldly standards

Our world is quite consumed with beautiful things, and that is a good thing.

It is good until it keeps us from embracing broken parts of our world.

As I search marketplace for perfect pieces for each corner of my home.

As I scroll and come across a breathtakingly beautiful post that makes me long for simpler, days in quaint farmhouses and lovely gatherings.

As I look for beautiful scenes to capture in my home - something photo worthy by our cultures standard.

I’m pulled in my heart—do I treasure beauty so very much that I am repulsed by the broken pieces of our world?

Have I fallen in love with beauty so much that I’m no longer available to entering the darkness and brokenness?

Where is the beauty in sitting outside a psychiatrist office —a hall lined with doors with different labels offering help to those with addiction, disorder and broken up lives?

I watch people pass and wonder at the life they live. There is little beauty here.

Where is the beauty in talking with a fifteen year old on the street and finding they’ve recently returned from drug-rehab and are worried about their future?

Where is the beauty in watching children face excruciating pain inflicted on them by the very person God created to comfort them?

Where is the beauty in sometimes feeling your family is all pretending—pretending to belong to each other, love each other and fit together?

Where is the beauty when you enter brokenness?

It’s there. It just doesn’t fit well in a square photo or one minute video.

There’s no music to match it’s scenes.

But in these places you see the beauty of broken things healing, pain being met by a God who’s love cannot be stopped.

This is the very greatest form of beauty.

And when I’m tempted to crop it out because it’s not always understood or fitting to the world’s mold, I must remember—this is the greatest beauty we were called to cultivate and make space for.

Our homes can reflect this in the way they are set up. Our square photos can open up and share bits of it.

But may I always remember—prayer drenched lives cultivate the highest form of beauty. May I give my time more to this habit.

May I never be so absorbed in the appearance of beauty that it turns my heart from willingly reaching out to the hard places of life and entering into ugly brokenness.