Choose Beauty

They made tunics, artistically woven of fine linen…as the Lord had commanded… (Exodus 39:27-30)

Seek out beauty; create beauty.

Everything cannot be reduced to a cost analysis or a budget line item.

Efficiency cannot be the ultimate shibboleth.

Getting the most output for the least input to produce the maximum profit is not the carnal doctrine of life.

We humans need beauty, that is a part of what makes us human. We are the only species that sees beauty. That is because we are spiritual beings made in the image of God.

And the real issue behind beauty is that God is the source and standard of all beauty. Push God out of society and beauty disappears and we become little better than animals.

Without God, at best, you end up with “abstract art” with no connection to reality and the world around us. How can it. Without God – the source of reality and standard of beauty – at best, all we have is a blurry caricature of reality or an abdominal abstraction.

Oh we get used to it and impose some sort of meaning upon it, but we’re only fooling ourselves.

And then notice how seldom humans – God’s image bearers – are depicted in contemporary art. And if they are, they’re burry, disfigured distortions of real humans. (Think King George’s recent appalling portrait.)

Bottom line, for your own sanity and for the well-being of human flourishing…

The ONE THING for today: Seek out beauty; create beauty. It’s how you keep God, sanity, and reality in your life. Its how we save the world.

And one more thing, do not confuse sensuality with beauty. As one young man remarked upon observing a provocatively and scantly dress girl, “She makes me feel like a male but not a man.”

He got it.

Beauty calls us to the highest good.

Beauty connects us with God.

All else debases and dehumanizes us into animals and that’s no way to live.

Seek out beauty; create beauty.

Start with God.