Beauty

I have been raising support for a few months now, and it has been a blessing to be able to share what God has been doing in my life and hear about and pray for the things that are on my friends hearts and minds. Many of you have heard about and seen pieces of the ways that God has been working in my life in the past year and the ways God continues to work in my life. After a perfect day hiking Mt. Nittany with Bekah last month and sharing in each others lives, I thought about the times in college I had spent an afternoon in the mountains with a close friend or alone. I missed it, so I took a day to just pray and be still before God. So much has changed since last summer, and I needed to get away from my apartment and just listen. I spent the day at Maymont, and I was once again amazed by the things God has done for me and the reality of the gospel. There is so much that I don't know or understand about God and creation, but the one thing I really appreciated that day was the beauty of it all. I had written down the lyrics to "In Christ Alone" and some thoughts I had in my notebook at RUF one night, and reading those lyrics again with no music, slowly, and quietly at Maymont, well it was just beautiful. And yes the women in my Bible study will tell you that I think fractals and elegant solutions to problems are beautiful, and the flowers at Maymont pictured above are beautiful, but the truth about Jesus just beautiful on a different order of magnitude.