more thoughts on nourishing the soul...

Several months back I was sitting at my favorite Starbucks on evening.  It was still winter and it was cold.  I sat at a small table by the window, Bible and journal nearby, trying to sort out my jumbled thoughts by tapping them into some kind of order via the word processor on my laptop.  I sipped coffee... I watched the couple in front of me, meeting with a photographer to talk about their upcoming wedding.  People coming in and out, in a hurry.  I stared out the window at the beautiful white lights that lined the trees that lined the street.  The cold night and my solitary little table was warmed by the gorgeousness of those lights on the bare branches against the dark sky.  They lined the small street like so many golden arches, magical almost.  I sipped and stared, dazzled, blessed by them.

My reverie was inturrupted by a tiny little girl with black hair and dark eyes crying out, "It's beautiful!  Mommy, Mommy, I want to show you something beautiful!" She was standing by the window, her hands cupped around her face at the window, gazing, like me, at the fairy-lit trees lining the dark little street across from us.  I turned back to my coffee and smiled.  "Mommy!", another urgent cry came.  The mother was busy chatting with the friend at their table, but kindly answered, "Hold on, dear, I don't want to get up right now and I'm trying to finish my coffee."  This little lover of beauty was not to be thus easily put off.  "Okay.. but, just come here a minute and look!"  This time the mother answered, "okay, let me look."  

"Close your eyes!  Okay.  Look that way.  Open your eyes."   Effective pause.  "Isn't it beautiful?!?"

"Awesome!  Now..."  and so the adult conversation resumed.

Adults... so many times, we just.... don't...  get it. Not at all, for all our life experience and education of 18 years plus.  I wished, then, to always be like a child in the way I appreciate beauty.  That I might always gasp, and even gawk, sometimes, at the wonder of creation and the loveliness of the little things.  At least just take time to pause and soak in the glory of a wonder, albeit small.

I try to stay true to my resolve to never miss seeing something beautiful, when given the opportunity, but I laugh when I think about my walking down a hall with a group of girls in a church once; in the stark hallway, I was suddenly captured by a glimpse of pink sunset-clouds through a small window to my right and automatically started walking towards it, like metal to a magnet... even though the girl on my right kept going straight and suddenly a near collision was avoided by laughter.  Oh, good times...  There is, such a thing, I suppose, as being dangerously distracted by beauty.  :)

But, I'd rather be dangerously distracted, than to be  apathetically un-affected.  I want to be like the little girl, and not like the mom.

Don't you think that God must, sometimes, just bless us with some lovely something across our path, and so desire for us to stop and notice it as a gift from Him, and know His love, and then glorify Him?  It's just too precious to not stop and revel.