BEAUTY

BEAUTY
September 21, 2017

Prayer: Oh Lord! I want to stand (or kneel) in awe of You today.

Scripture: Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Philippians 4:8 NIV

“I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me…” from Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses captured my imagination when my father read it to me as a child. Now that I had found a beautiful choral setting for my children’s choir, I couldn’t wait to teach it. A true classic, it became for me one of those pieces I went back to again and again.

God has given teachers this treasure of opening beauty to their students and being enriched in the process. Sometimes we get caught up in the day-to-day materials presented with our curriculum, and forget that we have treasures from our own life experiences that will to some degree change children for the better as we share them. Whether it be catching sunlight through a simple prism, gathering around to examine the tiny feet of the classroom gerbil, listening to a beautiful Chopin nocturne, studying a Winslow Homer engraving, or reading a letter written by a soldier to his wife during the Civil War, we can open a world of beauty to our students. In fact, we shortchange them if we ignore it.

In our fast, impatient, rude world of the twenty-first century, we need beautiful things in our lives to appreciate and nurture us as fully alive humans. God throughout His word speaks of beautiful things, from the Garden of Eden to the Beautiful City. Children need to be taught to appreciate. They need to know more than that which is fast, loud, beat-throbbing, violent, animalistic and in-your-face. Expose your students to something truly worthy today. Teach them to see or hear or taste or feel something beautiful!

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