Finding Beauty

What if our job was finding beauty? What if we didn't see the mess but saw the potential? Maybe if we focused on the ray of hope, the glimmer of uniqueness each of us holds, maybe things would be different. Maybe it would give that someone struggling something to fight for, something to hold onto. If we took the time to get to know people, even the difficult ones maybe they could surprise us. Maybe they were brushed aside a long time ago and ever since their heart collected dust making it hard for their beauty to truly shine.

When I think of finding beauty I think of Jesus. When he came here, he didn't get caught up in reputations or a person’s past. He waited at the well for a woman who needed a reminder that someone truly cared for her regardless of her past or present circumstance. Or the prostitute that poured her most expensive perfume and washed his feet with her hair, he saw past the mess of her life and found beauty.

I feel bombarded by messages from TV, magazines; just people in general to focus on the negative. Instead of finding beauty we want to find the screw up, we want to point the finger; we want to find the ugly. Sometimes we want to see it in other people so we don't have to see it ourselves, or we want to know that someone has it worse than us and we actually find relief in that. The other day someone took the time to hold the door open for me, talk to me, to relate to me. That person made my day a little brighter. I think when we start looking for the beauty in others we find beauty in ourselves. We start to heal from our own hurts, our world expands into something greater than ourselves, the dust slowly gets blown away to reveal the beat of our hearts, what we were made to find.