Beauty is in the eye of they beholder.
As I drive through the wintery scene, my eyes behold.
I am in wonder of all the color. The sky's transition from afternoon to dusk, fraught with blues and whites melting into rose and ochre. The sun behind a cloud scrim, beams escaping through hidden pockets, muted light streaming over craggy plateaus. The mountains morphing into a misty mauve as the sun begins its descent behind the horizon.
Even the dry and dormant fields are bursting with their own seasonal expressions: Long, brittle barley-colored grasses with hughes of pink line the roadside, blushing as i pass by. Khaki velds cover the landscape. Papery leaves dressed in sage and cinnamon still cling lightly to slender trees. Willows, with their long, naked tendrils, gently sway to an invisible breath. Here and there, patches of charcoal and ash, where farmers have carefully burned away the remnence of last season.
I drive by a privately owned piece of land full of zebra, wildebeest, ostrich, and small antelope.
In moments like these, when I look out into the creation of this majestic land, and behold the beauty, my heart whispers in awe:
I get to live in Africa.
But it was not always this way.
I embarked to southern Africa six years ago with obedience in my heart and frivolous, naive impressions of Disney's "The Lion King" dancing in my mind. My introduction was anticlimactic, and my merry, sing-song fantasies were dashed once met by the dry, dead, wintery reality before me.
En route to the new home I had never seen, I was greeted by the grim remains of autumn harvests. The previous season's strong stalks of emerald, with amber tufts and golden kernels peeking out from their wrapping, were empty shells, ghosts of maize. Sunflowers, once blazing with color, necks stretched on poles of graceful green, faces bathing in summer's sun; now hung their dull and withered heads deep into their aged and hollow chests.
Radiance replaced by winter's cold, cruel hand.
Even the sky's blue seemed icy and uninviting.
When I gazed upon the sunflower graveyards, field after field of them, my heart became faint.
How could I survive in a land devoid of beauty and life and everything that would make my heart sing?
God, what have you called me to?
I drive on to my destination lingering on these, my earliest memories of this place. I puzzle over them, looking at the stunning landscape I am privileged to behold. Why did I despair so? Then I remember: God makes all things beautiful in His time.
But it is not the land that has changed.
It is myself.
Over these years, something has taken place on the inside of me. The careful forming and reforming, working and reworking, under the skillful hands of the Master Potter, making pliable again a heart that was, in fact, hard and unyielding. In this, the ongoing process of softening and shaping, transforming me into the likeness of His Son, I am slowly, albeit sometimes painfully, evolving into what I was destined to become: God's masterpiece, created anew in Christ Jesus.
It is in this reformation, this metamorphosis that imparts the beauty of my Maker into my heart, that I become a thing of beauty myself.
Which then enables me, weakly but surely enough, to see the beauty in every thing.
I smile behind the driver's wheel.
I get to live in Africa.
And my heart sings: behold.
