Searching For Spring By Christine HooverSample

Day One 

Beauty Is Everything

Scripture: Ecclesiastes 3:11

When I was a teenager, someone told me, “Attitude is everything.” But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t positive-think my way to an obstacle-free life, nor a happy one at that. Attitude wasn’t everything. 

I know now that attitude is important, but it’s not everything for any of us.

Beauty is everything, and beauty lies at the heart of all of life for all of time, even where we think it couldn’t possibly exist—in the hurt, in betrayal, and when life seems to be beating us down. 

Beauty is the drumbeat that began playing on the earth’s birthday and has never stopped, a bass drum pulsing beneath all we see and touch and taste and experience in this life.

The mallet hits in rhythm: God has made everything to be beautiful in the past. 

Again: God will make everything turn out beautiful in the future. 

And again: God is working to make all things beautiful right at this very moment. 

Everything? This is difficult to believe, because few things are currently beautiful. But just because we can’t see how God has made and is making all things beautiful doesn’t mean it’s not true. It just means we must know how to listen, because only those who listen begin to hear beauty’s rhythm. 

At some point—and perhaps you are experiencing it currently—we all hold shattered dreams in our hands. You don’t need an attitude adjustment, nor do you need pithy clichés of positive thinking. You need the truth, and here it is: God can make something beautiful out of the most hopeless, broken-down thing in your life. Especially that. 

I know you mourn the passing of summer, those years of your life when you were full of innocence and high-flying dreams. I know you question whether the blossom can come after the winter you’re in. I know you wonder if God is at work or if he’s even there at all. 

I invited you to a death-defying hope. A despair-defying hope. I invite you to take a giant step backward to scan as much of the horizon as possible, and then hold a magnifying glass up to your current experience, searching for the hidden treasures in your life. 

Come and see how God makes everything beautiful in its time. 

What is beautiful in your life right now? What is yet to become beautiful?