In Times Like These
What good is beauty?
When babies and children are being kidnapped and killed, what good is beauty?
When tragic suffering continues to spread like wildfire around the world—including and especially in the Middle East—what good is beauty in a time like this?
Living in a country like Nigeria, I've witnessed my fair share of insecurity, instability, riots, killings, and robberies—not a full-blown war yet, but you get my point.
I must confess, I have had a good bit of eye-rolling at the concept of beauty, which I believed was a very Western concept. When you live in a country where most of its citizens live on less than $5 a day, you start to believe this beauty thing is not for you.
But that's because we have seen beauty as something that requires money.
Beauty is always all around. I think the challenge is having eyes to see it. Either everything matters or nothing matters.
In the words of Sarah Clarkson, “But beauty is healing those who have been hurt in a war zone. It's creating shelters where children can have refuge. It's rebuilding what has been destroyed. Beauty is a defiance of the forces of evil, disorder, and destruction because it is [their] opposite: where evil tears down, beauty creates; where there is absence, beauty fills.”
Tiffany Clark, in an essay, offers six practical lessons for how to fruitfully engage in extreme situations in the world. Here are two of them:
“Recognize when you need to step back and recenter around God’s goodness in your own life. Empathy can be both a gift and a curse. The grace God gives to the ones undergoing the trial is rarely given to those outside it. Empathetic engagement in a situation that is not our own can lead to virtual drowning. Remember to live in your own skin and the set of circumstances God has assigned to you before attempting to connect with what someone else is going through. Feeling guilty that you have it better than they do doesn’t help anyone; it simply denies the sufficiency of God’s grace for each of us”.
“Pray in faith, not in despair. This does not mean that the situation will go away or be immediately resolved. Engaging in global suffering requires getting over our need for everything to be tidy, secure, and “OK.” But it offers us the opportunity to meet Christ in the mess, which is exactly where He already is”.
How are we to respond? We pray and lament, but we also rejoice, sing, dance, watch the sunset, and read a book to our kids.
How are you holding up in these times?