The painting caught my eye like a beacon. Displayed along a long hallway in a big city hospital, its deep pastel hues and Navajo Indian figures were so arresting I stopped to marvel and stare. “Look at that,” I said to my husband Dan.
He was walking ahead, trying to find the elevator to a doctor’s office. But I hesitated, bypassing other paintings on the wall to gaze only at that one. “Beautiful,” I whispered.
Many things in life are beautiful, indeed. Master paintings. Scenic vistas. Inspired crafts. But so is a child’s smile. A friend’s hello. A robin’s blue egg. A sea shell’s strong ridges. To relieve the burdens life can bring, “[God] has made everything beautiful in its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). In such beauty, Bible scholars explain, we get a glimpse of the perfection of God’s creation—including the glory of His perfect rule to come.
We can only imagine such perfection, so God grants us a foretaste through life’s beauty. In this way, as the writer of Ecclesiastes says, God “has also set eternity in the human heart” (v. 11). Some days life looks drab and futile. But God mercifully shows us moments of beauty to ponder.
The artist of the painting I admired, Gerard Curtis Delano, understood that. “God had given me a talent to create beauty,” he once said, “and this is what He wanted me to do.”
Seeing such beauty, how can we respond? Thank God for eternity to come. But let’s also pause today and enjoy the glory we already see.