Goodness

It's hard to write about God's beauty when we live in a world that is often ugly. It's hard to write positively about God at all without sounding idiotic. The  reasoning for this I find is that most of the time, when God is written about by Christians, there is a certain tone and word choice that's really just....a turnoff. We speak in this sort of overly positive, Churched sort of way that no one, including most Christians, can ever relate to. We are never as rosey-lensed as we sound in our writing- real life is gritty and grimy, and worst of all gray. We write about things in a black and white- but rose tinted fashion that assumes that everything through the perspective of a Christian is actually perfect. Bad guys are always bad guys, and good guys are always good guys. Beauty is always beautiful and ugly is always ugly. The problem is, the world doesn't function that way, and deep down, neither do we. We are as gray, and gritty and grimey as the rest of the world whether we would have our writing show it or not.


I'm the typical cynic in most situations, so this may be no exception, but I find that beauty is often mistakenly hard to find. Or easy, if you know where to look. But ugliness, that's everywhere. We can pretend like it's not, but pretending doesn't change anything outside of ourselves. I created this blog to show the beauty I find in the world, but I also understand that things aren't perfect. Just because I have a relationship with God doesn't mean that everything that's bad is actually somehow good and all things I touch turnn to treasure in heaven or something. I realize this. I realize that often good opposes good and two negatives does not equal a positive. Even if we have a clear and distinct vision of right and wrong, those factors often don't have a clear and distinct separation in the real world. Black and white is most of the time gray. 


I feel like before I go on, I have to make this distinction. I have to let it be said that I've seen 20 ugly things to every beautiful thing. I recognize that sometimes things just suck. I think the thing most people forget though, that amongst the "suck" is beauty, and it's often the silent wallflower to the suck. But it's there. If you can look past the outerlayer of things that seem bad, often you can realize that there's goodness in there somewhere, and that goodness isn't always a lens to look through, but sometimes it can be. 


I just had to have it said.