Looking for God

I’ve walked these seven blocks about fifteen times by now…Six tenths of a mile walking past the beautiful and the ugly and fifteen times aren’t enough to take it all in.

I’m purposing to walk this street looking for  God.

There is the ugly and the sin-stained along this street. Some days this is mostly what I see, all that is twisted and broken and I feel like screaming. There are too many taverns; there are filthy words and littered sidewalks and overgrown weeds. In some of the windows there are signs of darkness that make me shiver.

Then there is the beautiful. There are tall oak trees with the first leaves landing softly on the ground and marigolds and roses still blooming.  There are benches to rest and children in strollers and the library with its majestic white pillars. The air is pleasantly warm and the sky is blue.There are beautiful people of every age and many races.

Some days I am walking down the street and I feel like looking only at the trees and flowers blocking out the people all around me. How can I forget in the first week why I moved here?

Mike Mason says it well:

“If man really is fashioned, more than anything else, in the image of God, then clearly it follows that there is nothing on earth so near to God as a human being. The conclusion is inescapable, that to be in the presence of even the meanest, lowest, most repulsive specimen of humanity of the world is still to be closer to God than when looking up into a starry sky or at a beautiful sunset.”

So really there is more beauty than ugliness along this street, right??

I need to be reminded again and again, that there is something beautiful in every person…because every person was created in God’s image.  I want to see people for who they were to created to be, the way that Jesus does. I want to offer them the gift of grace that Jesus and so many of my friends offer so freely to me.