ADDING TO THE BEAUTY

Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses. – Lao Tzu

We too often walk about with our heads so full of the day we miss the beautiful little moments. I do this. Just now while I was working on a story I am writing my son came in and interrupted me in the middle of a thought. I was momentarily annoyed. Until I noticed the red-rimmed eyes. He had been touched so deeply by something he had tears in his eyes and he wanted to share it with me. What else is there than that? A son coming to his father to share his heart.

Hit the brakes. Turn off the engine. Get out of the car. Stop the world. Pay attention.

A few days ago, at the start of the vacation I’m on now I stood on a hillside as the snow was falling on Colorado; big flakes settling silently on the landscape and on my clothing. For a few minutes as the snow fell into my world everything else fell away, all the junk that has been necessarily occupying my mind and distracting my attention. The more snow that fell, the more silent the world became, all the noise being muffled in the blanket of white, swallowed up. And for those moments I was mesmerized, caught up in the beauty.

On this thought train I was reflecting back on what my friend Rick the Scribe wrote in his latest book about lugging his stuff across the parking lot into his office building day after day, eyes on the pavement rather than on the “wild, craggy beauty” of the east slope of the Rocky Mountains just west of where he parks his car. When he takes a moment to listen he hears a voice say, Rick, take your eyes off the asphalt. Look up and into the beauty. Let your eyes rest for a moment on my beauty.

I wrote earlier this year about the idea of finding the art in the everyday, and took that thought a bit further suggesting we look for the artist. Sometimes when we tune in and open our eyes we even get to glimpse the heart of the artist.

A couple days before leaving on this vacation I was following my friend Walt as he maneuvered his car into a parking spot outside a grocery store where he was picking up a few things. In the car with him was his 18-year-old son, Ryan. I pulled my car into the next slot behind him. I switched off the engine and watched Walt get out of his car and walk around to the back where he opened up the trunk. He reached in with both hands and wrestled out Ryan’s wheelchair. I joined him as he unfolded the chair and wheeled it around to the passenger side where Ryan had already shoved open his door and was waiting for his dad to position the chair so that he could slide from the car seat to the chair. I instinctively reached down to help the boy, when Walt held his hand out to stop me saying, “no, Ryan can handle this part.” I watched Ryan use the arm and hand which have good strength and fair motion to pull himself up out of the car and into the chair, his legs dragging into position under him. Then he looked up at me with his great smile I see so often, making it clear he was glad I had joined him and his dad on this outing. I walked alongside as Walt wheeled him into the store.

I have been privileged the past few years of my life to see my friend Walt pour love out on Ryan. He and his wife adopted Ryan as a newborn from Korea and found out a few weeks after receiving the infant that the child had cerebral palsy. It was hard news to hear. It had quickly become clear the adoption agency had not been entirely truthful. Did he have it in him to be the father of a boy with such special needs? Should he even try? Should he send him back? And what future would the infant have if he returned him?

Then, a few nights after finding out the truth, he woke suddenly in the early morning hours. He couldn’t sleep for the burden on his heart and the worry in his mind. It probably wasn’t the first such night since finding out the truth, but on this particular night something came into his mind that would not go away. A verse from the 82nd Psalm. He didn’t even know the verse. Had never heard it or read it before. But there it was, loud and clear in his mind. Defend the weak and fatherless; do justice to the afflicted and needy.

Over the past four years or so that I have known Walt, I have watched him with Ryan, watched his tenderness, his commitment. Over and over again I have thought to myself how clear it is that God Himself brought Ryan to Walt, and gave Walt the heart to be that boy’s father.

Sara Groves wrote a song called “Add to the Beauty." It talks of our opportunity to add to the beauty of God’s creation. She sings…

Redemption comes in strange places, small spaces,
calling out the best of who we are

And I want to add to the beauty
To tell a better story
Shine with the light
that’s burning up inside

And this is grace, an invitation to be beautiful
This is grace, an invitation


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