Goodness and beauty are often equated with extravagance. The good life is expected to be an endless highlight reel of epic adventures, while embodied beauty is reserved for supermodels. But if we have the eyes to see we can see the glory that God reveals even through our mundane realities.
For instance, there’s a sense in which the human body is quite ordinary. We all have the same basic anatomy and physical functioning. And stripped of all our social pretenses, our basic form is simply male and female respectively. All the same, each body is a one of a kind temple. And it’s common structure doesn’t diminish the beauty it has to reveal. However mundane on the surface, each body remains a masterpiece of God that gives us glimpses of God’s infinite glory when our gaze is pure.
And this is true when it comes to the story of our lives as well. On the one hand, our story might seem rather commonplace and boring. And certainly this is not okay when it’s the result of our passivity. But an otherwise faithful life might not be marked by much fanfare or public praise. Even still, this unremarkable life humanly speaking might be the subject of rather remarkable things in God’s kingdom. It’s glory is in the eye of the beholder and we must learn to see as God does.
Of course, some people are objectively more attractive, just as some stories are more captivating. And these have their own glory. But the glory of one should not blind us to the glory of another. The extraordinary and the ordinary are both praiseworthy in their own right. And we miss the everyday glory God has blessed us with when we only have eyes for the particularly dazzling.
In the end, God has infused even our mundane realities with his infinite glory. Don’t let what’s common blind you to the deeper goodness and beauty it still has to reveal.
Photo by Demeter Attila on Pexel
