The Most Beautiful Thing I've Seen 01 - Light Issues

My next several posts over the coming weeks will be focusing on a book that I just started reading, The Most Beautiful Thing I’ve Seen: Opening Your Eyes to Wonder by Lisa Gungor. I received the book as part of a pre-launch group and have been itching to get into it but lengthy days at General Assembly did not help with getting much reading done. I have loved the music that the Gungors (Lisa and her husband Michael) have done as well as what I have heard from them in other media (podcasts, etc). The book is a story of Lisa’s journey of faith and life and I am very excited to dig into it.

In the introduction, there was one paragraph that just really spoke to me and connected with my own experience of faith. Much of the focus of the book is on how her faith has changed and she shares the following in the introduction:

The journey toward new sight can be equal parts beautiful and all out hell. But it comes to all of us the same—slowly, in moments separating old from new, before from after. Moments that split time or split our very souls, and we suddenly see life as we have never seen it before.

I have experienced this same thing time and again. Times where things in my life seemed so very clear and times it felt far from it. It has never come quickly but instead it takes time and is so unlike everything in our fast-paced society. Sometimes a question arises in my heart that I don’t even know is there until it begins to emerge in new ways through what I experience of faith and life. Sometimes an experience happens that doesn’t come around to me until months or, in several cases, years later.  Times I have experienced God right there with me and times when God felt thousands of miles away.  But like Lisa shares, through these we often suddenly come to see life as we have never seen it before.

This happened on my walk this morning with Scout. Right in the middle of the lower third of this picture are some plants that just before I took this picture were illuminated with a single shaft of morning sunlight. It was beautiful and so incredibly striking. However, by the time I was able to get my hands on my camera, the light had been obscured by a cloud. This is the spiritual life at times - moments of illumination and new sight and then us seeking to capture it once again. But what I take comfort in is that I remember the moment of seeing that light.