Beauty Everywhere

Just walking around the neighbourhood gives me the chance to enjoy lovely flowers and grasses the city has planted in boulevards and sidewalk planters.  People have planted lots of flowers on porches, in front yard gardens, even down the back alley.

There’s so much beauty and goodness to see if we just take the time and opportunity to see it.

Isn’t that often the way we are in life as well?  We easily see the beautiful things that are before us or that we intentionally seek out.  On days when life is going well it’s not hard to find things to be grateful for and let our hearts embrace a smile.

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But then the tough days come and the challenges pile up around us and inside us. Then what do we see?   

One of the writers in the Bible had a variety of times – easy and challenging – and wrote these words:

You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you,

in a dry and parched land where there is no water. I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory. Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you. I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands.

Psalm 63:1-4

Well Loving God, certainly we’ve seen times of feeling parched as well as times of seeing Your power and glory active in our lives.  We pray that You will work in us again, by Your Holy Spirit so we can say with the writer of that Psalm, “because Your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you.  I will praise you as long as I live.”

Thank you for eyes to see and ears to hear wonderful things that You are sharing with us every day.  We don’t want to miss them simply because some things go wrong in our circumstances or relationships.  We pray to be people who are trusting and who are seeing You at all times and in all things so You can give us Your peace.

As we go through today we pray to see more of the positive things that are around us than the negative.  We pray to be grateful for what we have rather than what we don’t have.  We pray to see the strengths and good things in others rather than focusing on their mistakes or the way they irritate us. 

We pray to be encouraged with the abilities and opportunities You are giving us today to contribute to the lives of others.

Help us to take that good long look, and then a second look, and then a closer look, relying on You at all times to help us see what’s there and how to understand it all inside Your good purposes.  Amen

Let me leave us with this thought:

Finally brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

Philippians 4:8