For beauty's sake...

I have a love for beautiful things.
Beautiful scenery, architecture, clothes, artwork, jewels, faces, etc.
I love colors & patterns & sparkle & uniqueness.
I love a good sunrise, the way the light hits my front porch, the way the dew glistens on the lily's in my yard, the singing birds that make their homes in the trees.
I think traveling rain clouds are beautiful. Their rolling, purple billows & the way the trees bend & twist towards them.
I also love beautiful writing. Writing that can take me to a specific time & place. Writing that helps me see better than my own eyes could.
I love the writing of Donald Miller.
I just finished reading Through Painted Deserts by Miller & thought I would share some of the beautiful passages that spoke to me....
Words that say things I feel, but can't seem to say for myself.
Words that accentuate the beauty of this life we've been given.

The cosmos was just spinning around up there, as if to create beauty for beauty's sake, paying no attention to the frivolity of mankind. And I liked the cosmos.  I liked the cosmos very much.  It seemed that it understood something, perhaps, humanity did not understand. 

I needed God to be larger than our free-market economy, larger than our two-for-one coupons, larger than our religious ideas.

And it feels tonight, as if there is much to think about, there is much we have been given & much we have left behind.  The smell of freedom is as brisk as the air through the windows.  And there is a feeling that time itself has been curtained by darkness.

Everything is like a symphony, if you think about it. Birds are perfect, & crickets come out of the wet woods like a choir.  And this is another accident, I think to myself, that we have ears to hear, & that nature itself worked perfectly to calm the soul, & wind from a tornado has that perfect pitch of fear, that train rumble of death, & music, music as if it is an accident, may be one of the greatest miracles of them all, as beautiful as romance or color or the power of water.  All this silence is thick & buzzing & it takes some effort to break it.

Time moved quickly today. It passed like a whisper.  The hills have completely buried the sun.

Life is more than clothes & cars & a new flavor of toothpaste, that it is community & creation & beauty & humanity.

There is a serenity in life, after all, & once a withdrawal is felt at having left the lies behind, a soul begins to feel at home in it's own skin.

Thanking God for the beauty & for rest & thanking Him for something better to believe than commercials.

God made a whole beautiful earth & decided to put you in it, to experience all of this beauty.  You can't do that watching television all the time.