Raging, Ranting, Raving, and Rhapsodizing

On Wednesday I was riding the light rail home after writing my last post, filled with sadness. The route I was on goes through a very industrial area of Denver and through some ghetto neighborhoods. I was just looking at the landscape as we sped along, and all I could see was ugliness and waste. My eyes drifted down to the ground and I felt even more melancholy looking and the rocks and bits of trash strewn about. Is there no beauty in this world?

Then I noticed something else. Some of the rocks had bits of mica in them so that at a certain angle the sun would shine on them and reflect the light. Each little spark happened so fast and faded away just as quickly, but there were so many, and at such a great speed it was like this sea of rocks- this waste- was sparkling.

There's a lot of ugliness in this life. We live in a fallen, imperfect world. But I'm finding that if I look at life from the right angle there's a lot of beauty, too. Over the last few days I keep seeing those little explosions of light happening.

I saw a very pretty woman stop to give some money to a bum- and more importantly, to pause and really look at him- when every single other person had passed him without even acknowledging his existence. I saw a young father being sweet to his little girl at the light rail station. I saw a woman's face light up when her husband walked in the door of a restaurant to meet her. Every single morning since I started working here a year ago the FedEx delivery guy has walked in with a smile on his face and a nice thing to say.

These things seem rather insignificant in the grand scheme but when you string them all together the world starts to look a lot brighter.