Beauty in Brokeness

I’ve gone through my life wishing for a big eraser. I’d like to erase all that is ugly because it distracts me from beauty. Saturday morning after my run I stole away for a short walk down our beach. It couldn’t have been more beautiful, clear skies, breezy 70 degrees, and birds singing. Except that to me, it actually could have been more beautiful because I wanted to “erase” the trash that had washed up and spotted the shore. I had to force myself to enjoy the beauty beyond this distraction of imperfection. 

I want to erase the parking lot from my living room view. I want to erase the wrinkles forming around my eyes. I want to erase the way I snapped at the kids to hurry up. I want to just clean everything up and have it as it should be. Part of the reason I love photography is because I can crop the messes from the frame to bring the beauty into focus. 

There is an ache in me that longs for the beauty of the Garden on Eden, no trash, no pollution, no sickness, no bad moments in a day. Sometimes I fool myself into thinking this could be found in life back in America. But life is messy (even in sunny California) and beauty and brokeness often seem intertangled, inseparably rolled up together in a ball called “life”. 

So I continue my journey to find beauty in unexpected places and learn to accept that life, while far from “perfect,” is full of treasure. I want to choose each day gratitude rather than criticism and to love rather than erase the broken world around me.