I grew up in a developing country where beauty was a luxury.
Green lawns and gardens of flowers didn’t make sense in a world of concrete, where every square foot meant another place for a person to sleep. Children didn’t skip home from school with backpacks full of art to post proudly on the refrigerator door. No elaborate Thanksgiving feasts of golden-hued turkeys, buttery casseroles, and pumpkin-spiced desserts dressed up any tables there.
The practice of creating art or displaying beauty suffered as an impractical, theoretical pursuit. Creative aspiration didn’t seem to mesh with a world where, just across my street, a bevy of slum houses crammed together in a sea of mud and open latrines.
Many Muslims live in urban settings, in cities where throngs of traffic kick up dirt and pollution to create a smoke-scum air to inhale. Where thousands of jeepneys and mini-buses inch along a five-lane mess on two-lane pot-holed roads.
Stunning displays of red, orange, and yellow fall leaves announcing a season of Thanksgiving never make their way into these cities.
Sure, if you looked up from the noisy streets, you could sometimes see the tops of palm trees waving their luscious green fronds high and free from the hardships of the men and women straining for survival.
But it’s hard to justify pursuits of beauty and creativity, or to feel thankful, when malnourished children beg beside their mothers, and little boys selling gum bang on the windows of cars and buses.
This ugliness, this mess, is not how God intended His world to look. He created a beautiful world with colorful vegetation, a plethora of animals of every design, an array of night sky shows, and vast expanses of blue-green water with unimaginable art beneath its surface. It was good, God said, when He looked at everything He had made (Genesis 1:31). Made. Created. Imagined into being.
Most of the Muslim men and women in these crowded urban cities live with a deficit of beauty.
Those living in poverty—whether spiritual, mental, or physical poverty—need beauty, just as much as anything else. Beauty means hope. It breeds gratitude and thanksgiving. It gives width to tight spaces in our hearts. Beautiful music, beautiful paintings, beautiful food—even the texture of feeling a beautiful weave of cloth—expand our souls and our capacities to believe and to love. Beautiful spaces give us courage to endure the hardship we’re experiencing. It wells up in us an appreciation for life. It can inspire us to act, to access an inner part of us that might have a better idea.
Perhaps the gratitude of beauty needn’t be a luxury at all. It’s music for our souls that allows us to be thankful to a God who meant for us to enjoy more than just the daily needs of life.
As you appreciate a season of gratitude with family and friends, remember the millions of Muslim families living in bustling urban centers and pray a blessing of beauty over them. Ask God to breathe a sweet wind of peace over their day in the form of something beautiful and creative, that will still their souls and remind them that He sees and loves them.
Perhaps they will look up, and thank God with you.
• Pray a blessing of beauty over Muslim families living in urban poverty.
• As you celebrate Thanksgiving, ask the Lord to breathe a sweet wind of peace—something beautiful and creative—over poor men, women, and children.
• Pray that Muslims would discover the love of God through Christ Jesus, and that there would be a great release of praise and thanksgiving from the Muslim world.
Main photo by Jon Hurd
Original article: https://www.frontiersusa.org/blog/article/the-gratitude-of-beauty