About

For the Beauty… So many things to love about this most favored song. It’s a hymn. It’s written by a British guy (unashamed Anglophile here). It’s born out of the 19th century (I’d happily go back with penicillin in tow). It’s featured in the best movie to grace the 1990s (Psst… Little Women, 1994). It’s an emotional and worshipful response to the author’s experience of the English countryside (best place on God’s green earth). And most importantly, it’s a thoroughgoing attempt to catalog and thank God for life’s manifold gifts and blessings. In short, it’s a hymn of gratitude.

And that’s my quiet hope and prayer for this blog. The posts that you find here will talk about mundane things, merely amusing things, solemn and heart-rending things, and yet I want to dig around for the seed of thankfulness in all of it. There’s beauty scattered throughout life’s many varied moments, even in the ugly, cruel and inexplicable ones. Somehow there’s a lesson to be learned; a holy intimacy to be won; a transformation to behold. Even in something like Postpartum Depression, which I hope this blog will allow me to demystify for others and process for myself. It will also try to find beauty in something ordinary like a potty-training victory or a DIY project gone wrong (but hopefully right!).

The title of this blog leaves the subject of the sentence blank, open-ended. That is essentially how we experience life ourselves, trapped in linear time as we are, taking on each successive moment as it comes. There are two ways to respond to the looming “Unknown.” We can stare into the future with anxiety, fear and pessimism, as I naturally tend to do. Or we can prepare our minds to search for the beauty hidden therein, and trust that God will eventually show us what to thank Him for, whether in this life or the next.