In 2015, I decided to set my mind to one question as I read the Bible all the way through — “How did God intend for humans to interact with the material world?” And as he showed me several answers through scripture, I was impressed with the things I knew about stewardship, about love, about his sovereignty over all of creation. But the answers that fell fresh were the ones that over and over again, pointed to beauty. That’s how my word in 2015 became Beauty.
As an Asian-American, engineer, competitive type, I always gravitated toward functionality. There was very little art on the white walls of the house I grew up in. A beautiful finish on the piano or a glass countertop were things of beauty, but not without function — impermeability, scratch resistance, dust-cover, keeping the light moving through the room.
But my heart always longed for beauty. I loved composition and color, three dimensional works to study from different angles. My favorite classes in high school were art classes. Art museum have always been a favorite hangout of mine. I feel at home among the art. (Don’t ask how I became an engineer, that was apparently God’s doing, and I’m glad he did it.)
And in 2015, God reminded me of something I knew in my gut but hadn’t grasped in my head — that he is not only Good and True, but also Beautiful. There is value in beauty because He is the definition of beauty. My heart sings at a beautiful sunset because it was designed to sing at beauty.
Recently I’ve seen a few articles come up, about evolutionists rethinking macro evolution (between species) and even micro evolution (within species) because of the baffling beauty of creation. I love God’s complexity and the ways that he baffles the wisdom of the world through something beautiful, radical, illogical . . . like the way a bird’s feathers reflect light. I’ve never really shared a lot of the insights I received in terms of these themes through the years, but I see God’s hand changing my mind and moving my heart like movements of a concerto. When we do analyze, it serves only to aid our enjoyment, relishing, and reveling in beauty. And the analysis only exists to draw us back and capture our hearts again and again, just like God.
Incomprehensible (though we try, just as we do with the other elements of the natural world), indefinable (again, we try and come up short), beauty is just another way to touch the infinite value of a Holy God. I worship.
2016 was a year of loss. In 2017, “expansive” was my theme. And in 2018, “movement” seemed to epitomize the year’s events and outlook. At the outset of 2019, “with” was the word that came to mind for the year. I’m looking forward to telling you more about that next time.