The world ought to make sense. Right?!

Some things just seem to matter.  To everyone.  Things like beauty.  Or community.  Or justice.

We long for these things.  We crave them.  We have this intuition that they’re important and good and right.  Yet all too often they seem to lay beyond our reach.

What do we make of this?  Is it all a cruel joke?  Mere fantasy?  Or are these things actually signs — signs pointing to a greater meaning in the world?

What does it look like when Jesus is on the move? As Jesus brings transformation, what should we expect to see? Our third sign of renewal is, “beauty.” What is beauty? How does beauty point to God? How do we participate in God’s renewing work as people who create and enjoy the beauty around us? What is the church known for in the US today? What if we were known as those who created beautiful things? What is required to create beauty in our cynical, consumeristic world? Who are the authors, chefs, artists, gardeners, architects, storytellers, poets, and musicians among us who can lead the way for us? 

Practice: Receiving Beauty

“Signposts name a reality and point us in a direction.  Likewise, these … signposts name realities that all human cultures value as well as pointing beyond themselves to the meaning of life, to the meaning of the world.  They indicate, in fact, how we ought to ‘make sense’ of the world — how we ought to understand the way the world is and the challenge of being human within it.  The fact that we care about them and are puzzled by them is itself telling us something about the deep ‘sense’ of the world.” — Tom Wright