God is beautiful. And I don't mean just Him, but everything about God is absolutely beautiful. Who He is, what He's done for us, His creation... It's all beautiful.
It's hard to describe how beautiful Guatemala is because it's so vastly gorgeous that even photos don't do it justice. Sometimes I feel like even my eyes don't even do it justice. It's incomprehensible.
The rolling hills get me the most. These hills/ mountains shrink in comparison to the Rockies and the Appalachians. Every mountain has gentle, rounded edges that kindly invite you towards them. They are all so luscious and green that it makes you wonder if you're in the Garden of Eden. Looking out into the valleys that these mountains create makes you want to spread wings and glide through the warm fresh air and admire the view from above. But my favorite part about the mountains is how the Guatemalans use them for farming. Despite how steep these mountains are, almost every inch is used for farming. With each section of different crops, the mountains look like patches on a quilt draped over the land. It is breathtakingly beautiful. You can't look at the scenery and not just gawk at the sheer magnificence right before your eyes.
But that's not the only beautiful thing about God that I saw this week. This week we had a group from a university in Ohio come and work in San Juan La Laguna, focusing on health issues and the needs of a school in the area. This group was crazy, wacky, wonderful, unique, and above all, beautiful. It was a privilege to watch God work in the lives of the kids and professors in the group, as well as in the lives of the people in the community. At first glance, the juxtaposition between the beautiful landscape of San Juan and the tragic poverty is striking. But when you look closer, you can see a community of strong Mayan people closely connected to their past, living life in a happier way than most Americans. They don't care that they don't have warm water, or that their house may need a paint job. They're happy as they are. They are beautiful.
And let me tell you, there is nothing more beautiful than helping people connect to others who may be completely different from themselves. I had some time this week to watch the group from ohio interact with the Guatemalan students. These are two groups of people who are different ages, different skin colors, different languages spoken, different worlds. But one thing united them, and that's God. This group wouldn't have come if they didn't want to spread God's love to the community. And I think that's beautiful.
One night we were invited over to the local school's English teacher's house. There, we met some kids who had rough pasts. Because of this the English teacher had taken some of them under his wing. One particular boy we met was eager to tell us his story. As it turned out, this boy had just come out of rehab, recovering from a long battle with alcoholism. This seems like it would be a hard, touchy subject for him. And maybe it was, but the way he described his redemption almost brought tears to my eyes. Here is this boy who has been to Hell and back, telling us about how his life has changed thanks to God. All I could think of was a song by Gungor called "Beautiful Things," and the chorus goes,
You make beautiful things You make beautiful things out of the dust
You make beautiful things, You make beautiful things out of us.
God took this boy's broken spirit and turned him into something beautiful. God makes beautiful things out of us.
If this week has taught me one thing, it's that God's beauty is everywhere and in everyone. Sometimes God's beauty is as obvious and immediately evident as the scenery around us, and sometimes God's beauty takes a while to transform from a hard addiction to a second chance at life. Either way, one thing is for sure: God is beautiful.
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