RL4B: Relentlessly Looking For Beauty

There was a heavy rain storm the other night, a welcome reprieve from the heat and smoke of the last few weeks. As I was listening to the wind rattle anything not tied down, I glanced up at the top of the window where something was moving. It was a HUGE spider curled up in the center of its web, hanging on as the gusts blew. My toes scrunched up and I recoiled a little into the couch, as is my typical reaction to spiders, but after a moment I relaxed into awe as I reflected on the beauty of the structure that was withstanding the weather. This prompted a Google search! The spider and its web in my window during the day. Spider silk is robust, having a greater tensile strength than steel of the same weight, and an orb spider like the one in my window can weave a web twenty times its size in diameter. When building, it uses its own body as a measuring tool and senses a vibration change when a new strand sent floating on the breeze attaches to a solid object. And this amazing ...

Nate, the youngest of our two nephews on my husband's side, is enchanted by science. When he found out that Uncle Shawn had a new telescope, he couldn't wait to take it out. Since we live a couple hours away, we had to schedule a special time to get together, and we finally found time last weekend as we agreed to meet each other in the mountains to camp. Shawn's interest in astronomy began when he was about Nate's age, but he just recently saved enough money to buy an advanced scope with the accompanying accessories. He had set it up on our porch several times, but the surrounding light pollution left us wanting a better view. We waited until about ten o'clock then packed up the equipment and drove up the road to an open field among the pine trees. Once the headlights were turned off, the blindness set in. Shawn had a special headlamp that shone red light on his work space (designed to preserve the eye's vision in the dark), but I wondered how I was going to...

The concept of RL4B was coined by Methodist pastor Dave McConnell in a sermon on November 24, 2013. He proposed the image of a secret agency where the members received coded messages that were hidden in plain sight, visible only to those who went looking. These messages are Beauty. I believe this is Divine communication, a way to reflect God's love for us. But my non-Christian friends and family can be secret agents, too, knowing that beauty often defies explanation or scientific examination and connects us to something beyond ourselves. What do you find beautiful? There are many common, more obvious examples like sunsets or rainbows, but as we learn to see (or hear) beauty on a deeper level, we can find ourselves entranced by the most ordinary things like plants that give us fruits and vegetables or an ant colony preparing for winter. Perhaps the most powerful force of beauty is what it can do or say to us. Jonathon Edwards, an eighteenth century preacher, asserted that...

This is my first post in over 3 years, and I'm trying not to feel guilty about it. I'm the type of person who likes to commit to projects and do them on schedule in an organized fashion. This blog has not been one of them, and it bugs me a bit. Okay, a lot. But as I'm picking up writing again, I find myself seeking an outlet for sharing the things that I find beautiful and joyful each day. Since launching RL4B in July of 2014, I have found a new, meaningful way to describe the goal of relentlessly looking for beauty through the metaphor of a doorway which connects earth to heaven. Though I view it through a Christian lens, the experience is not exclusively a religious idea. Doorways are there for anyone who cares to pay attention to how this world shows us glimpses of a universal understanding and our connection to something bigger than ourselves. Doorways open up to    joy         beauty             smiles     ...

Simon Cowell may say I'm being indulgent. Matthew Inman could draw a cartoon questioning my stability and embellishing my imagination. Quite a few of my friends would simply call it coincidence. But what others may say in their own judgement (and that is their right) has no bearing on what I felt happen today, and it doesn't make it any less meaningful to me. Today, I got a glimpse of God at work. I believe God works in our daily lives whether or not we pay attention or believe it to be true. For me, this afternoon, it became strikingly obvious because of a series of out-of-the-pattern events. A) I wasn't sure I was going to town today; the errands I had to run could've waited. B) I was planning my route to the post office (visually thinking of the best route from my pharmacy) and I was driving on auto pilot. I was so confident in my path that I allowed myself to start counting the number of Subaru Outbacks on the road with me (six in two minutes!). C) I rarely c...

I've never been one of those people who get super-stressed during the holiday season. Maybe it's because I don't have kids. Maybe it's because I don't host parties. Maybe it's because my gift list is manageable and relatively short. Okay... it's probably all of the above and then some, but I've been thinking that there can be a different kind of Christmas rush: a new way to view the busy-ness of the season to see the underlying beauty. For years (as in more than 20) our Christmas tradition had always included traveling cross-country to visit extended family. When I got married, this changed, and I was in Montana on December 25th for the first time since I was a toddler (when my mom was due to have my sister). However, the long-distance trips didn't stop after this, they were just put off into an alternating-year schedule. We had some local years, but there was always the next year's travel to plan for. This year is different. Things have ch...

As I came into the building, I was greeted by a woman who said, "And here's another courageous soul!" I had just come in from the bitter cold weather; at noon it was only two degrees, and it had been below zero (way below!) the previous night. Don't think I wasn't tempted to stay home that day. In fact, that was one of the warmer days that week, and I had hunkered down and hid under my blankets more than my fair share. Sure, getting in the car and waiting for the heat was hard, however, once I was out of the house, the beauty of cold weather hit home. I realized that our cold, dry weather creates the only opportunity for the numerous trees on the nearby mountains to remain completely dusted in snow, as if some giant flour sifter was set loose over the landscape. And then to top it off, the sun shines brightly over it all, trying either to add its own special sparkle to the scene, or to melt its colorless nemesis in hopes of returning to fond summer memories...