“It is the message of my life that our mighty God will work through our difficult struggles in order to conform us to the image of Jesus Christ”

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Longing for Beauty

By Anita Kelly Couch

"One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord"....(Psalm 27: 4)

Why do you suppose we have such an intense aching in our souls for beauty?

Perhaps it is because we were first made in the image of Christ Himself-- the very essence of Beauty. Our first parents were first placed in a garden of unsurpassed beauty. Eventually, our lives in eternity will be filled with "gazing on the beauty of the Lord forever!"

Unfortunately, our understanding and appreciation of true beauty has been corrupted, because of sin; but certainly, the beauty we appreciate in this world is but a taste-- a foreshadowing, of that which is to come: the magnificent rainbow as it crosses majestically across the sky, the smell of a precious newborn baby after a bath, the majestic roar of the waves of the ocean as you walk barefoot down the beach, the glory of the mountains stretched out before you on the highway as you drive with your hair blowing in the wind, the sweet fragrance of a bouquet offered to you in love and friendship.

If "eternity has been set in our hearts", as the writer of Ecclesiastes tells us, could it be that this "secret longing" for beauty is our yearning for heaven? Could this longing be our heart's cry to see and to be with our Creator whose very pleasure we were created for? C.S. Lewis writes,

"In this universe..the longing to..bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality is part
of our inconsolable secret. And surely..the promise of
glory..becomes highly relevant to
our deep desire. For glory meant good report with God,
acceptance by God, response,
acknowledgement, and welcome into the heart of things. The
door on which we have all been
knocking all our lives will open at last... Apparently
then...our longing to be reunited with
something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to
be on the inside of some door
which we have always seen from the outside, is no more
neurotic fancy, but the truest index of
our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would
be both more glory and honor
beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old
ache."

Nancy Stafford in her excellent book entitled, "Beauty by the Book" concludes this thought so perfectly when she says,

"One day our longing and ache will end! Our hunger will be satisfied..
The door will open. And we shall be one with Him. Until then, we long for beauty and desperately need it in our lives."

Whom have I in heaven but Thee? And besides Thee, I desire nothing on earth. My heart and my flesh may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever" (Psalms 73:25, 26).