Beauty Never Lost

Louisville, KY

Afternoon sunlight slants between the blinds and across the bed and onto the wall, falling in rows of perfect rectangles of gold. My window looks out at a bright, cold college campus with red brick buildings a century old. Seeing the perfect blue of the sky and the shadow of the library steeple falling across the empty lawn, my heart physically aches because of the beauty of it all. It’s like my heart fills up and then swells to absorb as much beauty as possible, and it aches with the effort of trying to hold it all. My inability to hold onto it- that’s what makes all the beautiful things a little painful. The most beautiful scenes are all tainted with the sorrow of their temporality. Every meeting ends with a parting. Every holiday ends with goodbyes and a return to toil. The most breathtaking sunset disappears into darkness, and its peculiar glory is soon forgotten. The sweetest family memories are stained with conflict. The experience of seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time can never be perfectly preserved- not in picture or in writing or even in memory. The sound of a toddler's pure, undiluted laugh can't be saved. We try to hold onto the beauty by capturing it in a camera lens, but the best picture doesn’t give you the feeling of coming undone at the beholding of glory. I have seen so many unspeakably beautiful things, but they have all come to an end, and my memory is inadequate to savor the awe these things inspired. Sometimes, in the presence of such beauty, I can feel my heart simultaneously exulting in the loveliness before my eyes and breaking with the realization that it won’t last. That is the tragedy of this world- we are surrounded by love and glory and beauty and awe, but we can’t keep hold of it. We can’t stop our memories from fading and dimming any more than we can the brilliant light of evening golden hour. This weakness of the human memory is one of the saddest effects of the curse. The thought of all the beauty lost brings me to tears sometimes. 

But then I think of the world that is coming, where all things are made new and nothing is accursed. Where all the beauty of this life is present and is even more beautiful because it is free from brokenness and sin. The glory I will behold there will surpass the best I’ve seen here. And I will find that all the beauty I thought was lost is now infinitely better than I remembered. And there I will have all the beauty without any of the heartbreak of temporality. All the meetings without any partings. The holiday reunion without any goodbyes. The fellowship without any conflict. My heart will swell with beauty, but it won’t ache with inability to hold it all. Because I won’t need to hold it all. Because it will never go away. It will only become truer and more beautiful, forever increasing in glory. 

Because there, I will be with God. His dwelling place will be with man. He who is the source of perfect beauty- who is Beauty- will be the light of the glorious city where I will live. His beauty will never fade from view, and I won’t have the ability to forget it, and He will only become more beautiful and glorious and breathtaking the longer I behold Him. And I will go on beholding Him for

e t e r n i t y.