BY WALT ALBRITTON
OPINION —
To live wisely and well, one must come to grips with the reality that life is a mixture of opposites. There is sunshine and there are dark clouds. Good times and bad times. Pain and pleasure. Life and death. Joy and sorrow. Hardship is a universal human experience so everyone will face difficulties.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was right: “Into each life some rain must fall.”
That famous line is from his 1842 poem “The Rainy Day.” The poem remains good medicine for the soul on rainy days. Longfellow counsels us to remember that no matter how dark the clouds, the sun is still shining:
Be still, sad heart. and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall.
Some days must be dark and dreary.
Each of us has a choice. When clouds block out the sunshine, we can ”repine” (complain and fret) or we can ask the Lord to replenish our hope for the sunshine to break through the clouds. We can wallow in self-pity or we can look for the beautiful. On dreary days what I need to do is look for the beautiful. Because God is love, the beautiful is always there. We simply have to look for it, even if we must dry our tears to see it more clearly.
Those four words seemed like a message from the Lord: “Look for the beautiful.” The more I thought about it, the more I sensed this is the perspective the Lord wants me to have on dark and dreary days. Don’t waste time fretting — instead, look for the beautiful.
I wondered what I might find if I “googled” those four words. Google proved again that God is full of surprises. In 1899 a little known songwriter, Franklin Belden, composed the words and music of a song titled “Look for the Beautiful.” The first verse suggests that Belden was familiar with Longfellow’s poem for his counsel is similar to that of the famous poet:
Look for the beautiful, look for the true;
Sunshine and shadow are all around you.
Looking at evil we grope in the night,
Looking at Jesus we walk in the light.
Look for the beautiful, honor the right.
Belden composed three other verses, each using a different word for “look.” The second verse begins with “Think of the beautiful.” The third, “Talk of the beautiful, talk of thy Lord.” The final verse is an invitation to:
Live for the beautiful, love for the true,
Lifting the fallen as Christ lifted you.
Search for the jewels embedded in sin;
Bring them to Jesus, his blood washes clean;
Live for the beautiful, keep love within.
So what is “the beautiful?” Belden’s hymn suggests that we find the beautiful by “looking at Jesus,” and he invites us to “talk” about him and “live” for him.
Ultimately, for me, the beautiful is simply Jesus. And no hymn proclaims his beauty more majestically than a classic German hymn of 12th century origin titled “Beautiful Savior.” In 1850 it was translated into English and given a new title: “Fairest Lord Jesus.”
Regrettably, the English translation robbed us of this superb original first verse:
Beautiful Savior, King of Creation,
Son of God and Son of Man.
Truly I’d love thee, truly I’d serve thee,
Light of my soul, my joy, my crown.
The English version, which I have loved since my childhood, still melts my heart whenever I sing it:
Fairest Lord Jesus, ruler of all nature,
O Thou of God and man the Son,
Thee will I cherish, Thee will I honor,
Thou, my soul’s glory, joy, and crown.
My “Beautiful Savior,” then, is what I find when I look for the beautiful. And of course what Jesus is constantly doing creates beautiful realities for us to behold:
The tears on the faces of two estranged friends who have forgiven each other and embraced each other.
The look on the face of an eight-year-old child who says to his pastor, “I want to be baptized and give my heart to Jesus.”
Reading again these words on a birthday card your wife gave you 25 years ago: “In the thoughtfulness you show, in the tender words you speak, I hear the welcome of your smile, or just your hand upon my cheek, I see how much God loves me, and my heart is grateful, too, for the very special miracle of sharing life with you.”
The awesome joy of hearing a friend’s voice on your phone saying, “I just wanted to hear the sound of your voice.”
The thrill of reading a card from a friend who has written, “Thank you for the influence you have had in my life.”
Look, then, for the beautiful. It’s all around you because your beautiful Savior is always with you no matter how dark and dreary the days. The sun is still shining because the Son says “shine.”
