Beautiful

Have you ever wondered why you are drawn to certain things? Or, to go a step further, have you ever wondered why humanity is drawn to certain things? We may not all like the same kind of music, but we all enjoy some kind of music. We may not all like the same kind of art, but we all find some kind of art fascinating. We may not all like the beach or the mountains or the desert or the stars, but we all come to some place in nature where we look on in silent admiration and awe.

Why?

Why do we use words like Beautiful and Good and Right?

It isn’t hard to look around and get caught up in the evil and darkness and brokenness around you. More mass shootings on the news, more local murders and violent crimes, political agendas and propaganda everywhere you look, a remarkable lack of unity across social platforms, and the list goes on. It’s easy to lose hope. Yet we’re drawn to sunsets and shooting stars and moving music and stories about selfless acts and heroism. Why? Is it just wishful thinking? Is it just finding the few things in the world worth looking at, trying to hold on to them for dear life, and trying to push out the bleakness of everything else?

I don’t think so.

I think we’re drawn to the beautiful, to the good, to the right because there’s something inside of us that knows we were made for it. When we see these things in the world, there’s something in us that recognizes that they are just a glimpse of what the world could be. I believe we are drawn to these beautiful things because there is something in us that is searching for the really Beautiful Thing.

I believe we are searching for God. We put so much stock in relationships because we long for the one who will truly know us and love us. We can’t peel our eyes away from the stars because our eyes long to see the one who put them in their place. Our ears tingle at the sound of music because they anticipate the song of the one who called out to nothing and brought forth everything. The world around us is bleak, and it doesn’t sit well with us. That’s because something in us knows it isn’t right. Something in us knows it’s a shadow of something better. That’s because God has breathed life into our souls and He made us for more than we’re experiencing right now.

Our natural mind is drawn to those truths our spiritual being knows exist. Whether you believe in God or not, you know something inside of you is crying out for more. I think there’s a reason for that.

In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis put it very well:

In reality, the difference between Biological life and Spiritual life is so important that I am going to give them two distinct names. The Biological sort which comes to us through Nature, and which (like everything else in Nature) is always tending to run down and decay so that it can only be kept up by incessant subsidies from Nature in the form of air, water, food, etc., is Bios. The Spiritual life which is in God from all eternity, and which made the whole natural universe, is Zoe. Bios has, to be sure, a certain shadowy or symbolic resemblance to Zoe: but only the sort of resemblance there is between a photo and a place, or a statue and a man. A man who changed from having Bios to having Zoe would have gone through as big a change as a statue which changed from being carved stone to being a real man.

And that is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumor going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.

Something in you is crying out for more. Listen to it.