You could see the aurora borealis in Alabama the other night!  Everyone marvels.  The news is all over it.  Pictures everywhere.  You would think it is was a miracle.  But it is not, it is a perfectly natural event – ions and energy interacting.  I mean we can predict it for crying out loud.  How miraculous is something we can predict?  And yet we have acted for the past couple of days as if fish had started riding bicycles and a Cleveland sports team has actually won something.

Something in us longs for the beautiful, because that is the bottom line here, the aurora is beautiful, and while not miraculous, beauty is rare.

When God decided Israel needed a new king, He sent Samuel to the house of Jesse to anoint that new king and Jesse paraded all his rather amazing sons before the prophet.  As the first son approached, teh Bible says:

When they entered, he looked at Eliab and thought, “Surely the Lord’s anointed is before Him.”  But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

The aurora is beautiful, but that beauty pales in comparison to the beauty of a good heart.  But so often we see “as man sees” and not “as God sees.”  We see beauty in saving those we think oppressed when often those claiming to be oppressed are the ones with true hatred in their hearts.  We think it beautiful to “save the planet” even when it hurts those living on it.

It’s funny though, the beauty of the aurora does not disappear when one knows how it works – it is still beautiful.  That’s why we marvel at it – it is beautiful to its core.

This SUnday I head to church hoping to learn how to see genuine beauty and to treasure that which is beautiful to its core.