“God is beguiled by beauty into the work of creation by the beauty of the world. Imagining this beauty, our divine Beloved sings it into existence. At the same time, the beauty of the Good draws humanity and all creation back to its divine source.”
Wendy Farley, Beguiled by Beauty

On a Wednesday in June, I set off to hunt for beauty through the lens of a camera around Pinnacles National Park. In the cool of the morning, I was the first hiker to reach Bear Gulch Reservoir. The sun was still low enough in the sky that the light wasn’t too harsh. A pair of American coots paddled through the still water that reflected the deep blue of the sky and the bare rock skyline. I took hundreds of photos, each more beautiful than the last.

As I continued across the high peaks in search of California condors, I wove through the shadows of the towering pinnacles for which the park is named and ducked into the dark, chilly Balconies Cave, snapping beautiful pictures all the while. When I exited the cave, something changed. It seemed that beauty began to retreat as poison oak stretched across the dusty trail and the afternoon sun washed all the colors from the landscape.

Tired and hot, I turned a corner and came face-to-face with a tree so ugly that it stopped me in my tracks. Dead bark had sloughed off onto the ground around it. If trees had bodies, this one was missing its shoulder and chest, as though someone had attempted bonsai with a shotgun. Twisted as it was, it clung to life and produced a small, leafy canopy. Grateful for even meager shade, I wondered about this tree’s story of struggle and tenacity. I realized it was one of the most interesting things I had seen all day. I saw its true beauty.

Too often, we confuse beauty with perfection, prizing form over function and aesthetics over struggle. We look upon anything that diverges from an abstract ideal as ugly or marred. Yet our divine Beloved renders beauty differently.

During the seasons of Advent and Christmas, there is often a high expectation of perfection and beauty. Perhaps your ministry this season feels less than beautiful. You’d rather be planning how to pull the mighty from their thrones or pondering the wonder of the incarnation, but you’re stuck with more conversations about candle wax on pew cushions. Maybe something seems incomplete, twisted, or barely clinging to life.

You and your ministry are beautiful even if they don’t match some abstract ideal you yourself hold. God imagined your beauty and has sung you into existence. Beguiled by your beauty, God continues to sing—shaping and calling you back to your divine source, and God will be faithful to complete the good work in you that has already begun.

Philippians 1:6  “I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work in you will continue to perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ.”