RL4B: Relentlessly Looking For Beauty

Last Sunday, I had a serious case of the blah's. I had slept okay, but my energy level was on the floor and I was out of breath with the tiniest movements. I was lugging around extra weight from PMS fluid retention, made worse by my enlarged heart failing to keep pace with its pumping efficiency. I wanted to stay in bed. But I didn't. I put my complaints to the side and went to church, knowing from past experience that I never regret making the effort to attend once I'm there. However, once the service let out, I was keen to get home and eat my lunch in front of the television. And I was secretly hoping that my husband would abandon his plans of going for a ride in the mountains, so I could put on my sweats and lose myself on the couch. But he didn't. Instead, he loaded up our UTV (side-by-side) and asked if I was ready to go. At that moment I had a choice to make: I could beg off, citing my frumpy feelings and let him do one of my favorite things without me, OR...

I have loved swings for as long as I can remember. Anytime I was on the playground at school or visiting a park, I would run to the swingset to claim a seat. Jungle gyms fascinated me, but I could never muster the courage to climb higher than the second rung, not trusting my balance, and hanging upside down was out of the question for fear of falling on my face. Slides were okay but required a lot of effort in overcoming my fear of heights since climbing the ladder to the top took me a long time with my methodical, frequent stops to ensure my footing before moving to the next step. I liked to ride a merry-go-round, but pushing it required coordination or friends, two things I couldn’t always count on. But there was something about the smooth motion of a swing with the breeze on my face as I flew higher that gave me a sense of freedom, independence, and control along with a peaceful contentment. As an adult I have found a similar, though flatter, feeling on swivel cha...

Two weeks ago, I traveled back in time. My husband and I were looking for ways to celebrate our 20th anniversary when I came upon a unique opportunity - a dinner train across North Central Montana. Model trains were one of Shawn's childhood hobbies, and I've always been fascinated by the immense, steel machines, so we decided to purchase tickets. The loading station is almost four hours from home, so we packed an overnight bag and and planned our route through the vast plains that lie east of the Rockies. Arriving in town early, we had time to visit the local museum to learn about the people, trades, and origins of this Central Montana town. It was here that I began to sense the history beneath my feet. One exhibit displayed the common luggage of a late nineteenth-century woman boarding a train. Her trunk was an array of smaller drawers filled with jewelery along with a larger compartment for clothing. The mannequin was dressed stylishly in a feathe...

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     ...