Unnecessary Beauty
A few months ago social media was filled with pictures of the northern lights over decidedly not northern spaces. Places like Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Alabama got to see beauty usually reserved for places much farther north. Something about magnetic storms made it possible for all of us down here to see what we normally couldn't. In my own backyard you could kind of see a little with your eyes, but looking through a camera the lights became unmistakable.
I don't pretend to understand the science of how all of that works, but I was thrilled to stand in my backyard and keep looking. The thing about beauty is that you don't have to understand it to appreciate it. I don't know the intricacies of the phenomenon, but I know I loved to see it and to stand outside with my children taking pictures.
As I saw different pictures across social media it occurred to me that so many of the things we admire in the world are just "unnecessary beauty. " the flowering of a tree, the feathers of a bird, a sunset at night or a sunrise in the morning, could all be described as unnecessarily beautiful. It is just beauty for beauty sake. And I believe of course that God created that beauty for our enjoyment, and for his. We could live in a dull gray world, but God has put beauty and color all around us seemingly at every turn.
The northern lights we're happening in the type of light we can't normally see with our naked eye, but the beauty was still there. There's so much beauty around us that we never see, from flora and fauna to the spectrum of light that causes rainbows. It's "unnecessary" in the sense that it's only beauty for beauty sake.
God didn't have to create a beautiful world, but he did, and I'm so thankful for it. I wanna make sure I stop and take the time to enjoy it when I can. That's one reason I post pictures every week of some thing that strikes me as beautiful. I challenge you to stop in the midst of the madness of your week and look for the "unnecessary beauty" around you. Enjoy the sunset, look at the different colors of green on the trees, listen to the song birds sing, hear the laughter of kids playing. It's a beautiful world we live in, and God made it for us to enjoy. So look up, look around, look down even, and see the beauty around you that God has made. And then spend time to thank him for it.