Luke 24:31 “Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him….”
Maybe you’ve heard the story that was in the Washington Post a few years ago. Early one January morning a scrubby looking young man arrived at a DC metro and pulled out his violin. With his case open to receive donations from busy passers-by, he played a repertoire of classical pieces. Hardly anyone even noticed him. At the end of forty-five minutes the musician had received a whopping $32.17.
But this was no ordinary performer and no run of the mill instrument. The subway player turned out to be renowned violinist Joshua Bell, who plays for sell-out concerts, garnering as much as $1,000 a minute. His violin—a Stradivarius worth over three million dollars. Hidden beauty….
I think life is filled with hidden beauty. But like the hurried crowd at the DC metro, we rarely slow down long enough to discover it. We take pride in our busyness. It makes us feel important.
Today I did three loads of wash, cleaned the whole house, took the kids to soccer practice, had a friend over for lunch, answered ten e-mails, updated my status on facebook, squeezed in a Beth Moore Bible study, and made a caramel macchiato cheesecake!
Not a lot of time to recognize hidden beauty.
The “beauty” of beauty lies in its power to help us escape our self-absorbed lives. Not an easy feat, by the way. Francis Chan writes in Crazy Love that it’s time we get over ourselves. We’re like an extra, 2/5 of a second long in a movie that’s not even about us. It’s about him, and we are to use every 2/5 of the second to point to him. Beauty refocuses our “picture.”
So let God open your eyes to the hidden beauty in life. Let it draw you away from the frantic pace—if even for a moment—and redirect you to the place where true meaning lies. You might discover a Stradivarius, or better yet, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, you might get a glimpse of the Savior….