Lessons For Living Life Wide OpenSample

One day we were walking through the woods when Mareto stopped abruptly and looked up to exclaim, “Look! The tree rainbow!” I followed his gaze toward a tree that was bent and partially fallen. Its skinny trunk grew up out of the dirt and then arched over a pathway, where it ended by resting on a tree several feet away. It was tall, bending high above us, and creating a shape in the sky just like a rainbow. And I never would have noticed it.

But Mareto did. Mareto sees beauty in places I wouldn’t expect to find it, such as the broken trunk of a tree.

We kept walking, and not too many minutes passed before Mareto stooped to pick up a small, dirty, gray rock. He turned it over in the palm of his hand a few times before holding it up to show me. “The rock is a heart!” he exclaimed with bright, wide eyes, barely holding in his awe and excitement. Sure enough, this small rock looked as if it had been crudely cut into the shape of a heart. I wouldn’t have noticed that either. . . .

God tells us that when we love him, “all things work together for good” (Romans 8:28). That doesn’t mean everything that happens to us will be good; it means that God is bigger than our suffering and the world’s suffering. It means that God is actually powerful enough to make something lovely in spite of and out of the messiest and most awful parts of life.

But do we see it? Do we look for the beauty hiding around the next corner?

Do we actually see the arc of a rainbow or just the broken trunk of a tree? Do we believe the sun is beaming above the dark clouds, or do we fixate on the storm? Do we see that every single broken thing in life is really just redemption waiting to happen? . . .

Mareto reminds me that a moment of insult is an opportunity to forgive. A friend in trouble is a chance to help. Loss is a reminder of heaven, and pain pushes us to our Helper. There is beauty and light in everything. We simply need to train our eyes to find it.