Category: Thoughts

Isn’t there something inherently beautiful in detail? An object may not seem objectively beautiful (it may even be considered ugly), and yet it is invested with a sudden beauty when its intricacy (the unfathomable wonder of minutiae!) is unveiled. I had a strange and wonderful experience of this sort upon seeing a worn and weary rust-rimmed garbage can. After immediately dismissing the object as dirty (worthless even?), I saw deeper inside the little orange circles and the way they spiralled around one another. And in a peculiar and illuminating moment of revelation, even the garbage belonged and was not merely something waiting to be thrown away.

After I finished my run and just as I began to walk home, it started to rain. The first thought to occur to me was, “Oh no, it’s raining!” as is the usual and seemingly natural response (by now automatic). Then I stopped (my train of thinking; I didn’t stop walking) and asked myself, seeing that I was already drenched with sweat from my run, did it really matter whether my hair and clothes got wet, whether they were “ruined”? I stopped in my overhasty judgement of the rain as a negative occurrence. I stopped and the rain became a gift.

Suddenly every drop of rain was like the tiny pinprick of a diamond and I was dazzling, adorned with their light. Every drop was a pinprick of love, for love does not always (does not often) come in the shape it was intended. Every drop became a concrete manifestation of God’s promise to cleanse me, to wash me clean of fear and shame, to purify and create me anew in His image.

And what’s more? I was sticky and hot after running in the dry dust of summer, and the coolness of rain felt extraordinarily good.