Brave Enough to See Beauty

I was about 7 years old when I fell in love with the JC Penney department store.  Growing up in a small town it was the only department store in the area and I thought we were pretty uptown to even have it.

We weren’t frequent shoppers by any means, but Penney’s, as my mom called it, was the standby when we needed a clothing item on short notice or a last minute pair of shoes for Easter Sunday.

I loved going there.

But it wasn’t the shoe department that drew me in.  I don’t remember much about the clothing section, the jewelry section or the tiny home department.  I was always enamored by the Customer Service Center.  More specifically, the gift wrap.

Please tell me someone else remembers the huge JC Penney customer service and catalogue department and…the gift wrap area.

Each and every time we walked past that wall display, I couldn’t help but stop and stare.  Gifts wrapped with a variety of weighty papers – heavy foil paper, gorgeous patterns with just the perfect array of complementary colors – not to be confused with any cheap, shiny, or tacky wrapping paper, this, friends, was gift wrap.  The display boxes were paired in stacks and each embellished with a huge puffy bow, a flower pic or equally beautiful adornment.  And they were just lovely.

I was 7 and they were my favorite part of the entire store.

I was 7 and beauty had caught my eye, caught my attention.  I noticed.

My dad did too.  Well, he noticed me, noticing the gift wrap department.  And that Christmas (and many others after) he took one of the gifts he and my mom had purchased, went down to the JC Penney store and paid to have them wrap it for him.  I don’t even remember what the gifts were.  Not one.  But I remember they were impeccably wrapped.  And that was my favorite part.

 

Fast forward a good 20 years and I was now the mother of a toddler, yet still charmed by beautiful things.  Trying to manage this new and messy stage of life, I sought to maintain beauty in my home while fighting the insane amount of toys and character-themed baby equipment that seemed to flood our living space.  Since when did babies come with so much brightly colored stuff?  And when did we become convinced that we must have it all in order to raise a thriving human?

A question for another day, I guess.

Anyhow, I battled the stuff valiantly.  And the messes right along with it.  Soon enough we added more babies and with them, more stuff.  The stuff just never seems to go away as you transition into various stages with multiple kids – baby equipment AND toddler toys, Legos for the biggest kids and let’s not forget they are, in happy play, making continuous messes of it all.  All. The. Time.

I’ve graduated from much of that now.  Clearly, my tribe still knows how to make messes, but that obtrusive baby equipment is gone.  Most of the toddlers toys have found new homes.  And it’s only now that I’m wondering – what if that really was beautiful? 

 

Last month I attended a homeschool conference and I sat under the tutelage of a more experienced mom who was clearly excited and passionate about what she was teaching.  Having never met this woman before I studied her as she spoke and began to learn from her teaching style.

She had a key phrase.  You’ve heard people who use key phrases right – one they use quite often and becomes signature to them/  As she talked about the learning patterns and abilities of different age groups of children, as she discussed the correlation and connections between art and history or she relayed simple tricks for encouragement or memory recall she often concluded with one phrase.  “It’s beautiful”.

And when she said it, it was easy to see, she believed it.

She saw beauty in teaching kids.  She saw beauty in the struggle and effort and challenge.  She saw beauty in rolling up your sleeves and diving in with them, sorting out seemingly unrelating pieces and discovering truth together.

And you know what? She was right.

A surprising word choice became my greatest take away form the entire conference.  Her choice to see beauty, not only in the orderly or “normal” paths of learning, but in the small moments, in the simple connections, in the raw and messy process of sifting truth out together rocked my view of beauty a bit.

There is so much beauty right in front of us, if we are brave enough to see it, friends.

There is beauty in a house full of baby equipment.  There is beauty in toddler toys and all the books they litter the floor with.  There is beauty in the pile of backpacks that litter the car and the endless papers those kids bring home.

Add there is beauty in the stacks of textbooks that have presently taken over my dining room table, if only I choose to see it.

 

Of course there is a place for orderliness, my brain might explode without it.  But I am not in a fight against the messes my little people make, against the stuff that they enjoy, against this life with kids that I’m constantly trying to tame.  You are not in a fight against the relationships that challenge you, the marriage that feels like work, the problems you haven’t quite found answers to yet.  All of this, this big huge mess of a life that we’re constantly cleaning up and creating at the very same time, it’s beautiful.

God sees you in this spot.  He placed you with these people.  He ordained you for these tasks.

Of course, it’s messy.  But I think if we can just stop fighting the messy, if we can bravely take our eyes off of it for even a moment, we might just see that this life, even with all it’s crazy turns and bumps in the road, even with a dining room table covered in textbooks, it’s beautiful.