What’s Beauty Got to Do With It? Enjoying Life in a Dying World
by Deidre Braley
What’s the purpose of enjoying life in this dying world?
I asked myself this question over and over again last year as I watched my mother-in-law battle cancer. If all of our lives come down to this same single moment—our inevitable last breath—how on earth could any of our striving for beauty and brilliance and pleasure and joyfulness really matter?
Maybe it’s all just frivolity, I began to think. Just a distraction from our own humanity. We use it to convince ourselves that everything is alright—until everything is not. Those dismal thoughts clung to my skeleton; they hung closer than my own flesh.
As apathy settled in, I resigned myself to walking around this world living as someone in exile—homesick for heaven, without any hope.
But God has advice for exiles. After the Israelites were deported from Jerusalem and forced to live in Babylon, he said to them:
“Build houses and live in them.
Plant gardens and eat their produce.
Find wives for yourselves and have sons and daughters…
… Multiply there; do not decrease.
Pursue the well-being of the city I have deported you to.
Pray to the Lord on its behalf, for when it thrives, you will thrive” (Jeremiah 29: 5-7, emphasis mine).
While our natural tendency in seemingly inhospitable landscapes may be to wither and wane, God commands us to do the opposite. Do not decrease, he says. Whatever you do—don’t do that. Rather, build and live, plant and eat, marry and make love, pursue and pray, and thrive—this is what he asks of the Israelites, and of us.
While our natural tendency in seemingly inhospitable landscapes may be to wither and wane, God commands us to do the opposite.
All of these actions indicate a sense of flourishing with the land, one another, and with God. They intimate that God’s plan for us, even while we live with the reality of brokenness and death, is to experience the fullness of abundant life.
Living an abundant life means inhaling the beauty offerings that God provides each day. It means gulping salt air into our lungs and noticing how alive that makes us feel. It’s feasting on delightful laughter over a shared meal. It’s devouring artwork and poetry and marveling at the birds and letting sunshine soak into our skin, our bones, our soul. It’s acknowledging that brokenness and death haven’t been able to stamp out the hints of heaven that are thriving here on earth.
Living an abundant life means inhaling the beauty offerings that God provides each day.
Clearly, God doesn’t want us to limp through life under the impression that our dying moment has the power to rule over us. Jesus died in order to untether us from any such notions, so that we may be free once and for all from the question, “Does beauty (and the enjoyment of it) really matter?”
It matters to God, and he intends for us to enjoy it.
So, come. Let’s go pain and sing and garden and pray and embrace the beauty of this world while we dwell here together.
Deidre is a wife, mom, and writer who’s always down for a coffee and chat. @deidressecondcup
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New International Version of the Bible. Verses labeled NKJV are from the New King James Version of the Bible.