Do You Know the World is Beautiful? Part II

After my last post I began praying that God would open my eyes to the beauty around me in Soshanguve, and help me appreciate it.  I began to recognize a lot of beautiful things I normally take for granted.  The beautiful pinks and oranges and reds of the sunset; a clear, starry night sky; a lunar eclipse (ok, that one I don’t normally take for granted, because it’s not a usual event).  While I may not have places where I can spend long peaceful hours outdoors, I am learning to affirm the beauty that God places in front of me every day.

And then there are the small miracles, the beautiful things that happen that remind me that my heart can be touched by a beauty that goes beyond what my eyes take in.  When this little girl:

runs toward me with outstretched arms, my day is instantly better.  When I see a teenage boy who is so eager to grow up—who has written Born To Kill on his arms in marker because apparently that makes him cool—playing gently with a little girl, and then helping her tie her shoe with great affection and tenderness, that is beautiful.  There is a choir of young people at Jabulani (the government-run children’s home where I volunteer).  I got to sit in on one of their practices once, and acapella, a small group of 8-10 teenagers from broken homes filled the room with some of the most beautiful sounds I’ve ever heard.  I’ve never cried just from hearing or seeing something beautiful, but I was holding back the tears then.  Somehow, it reached my soul.  When, time after time, people welcome me into their lives and homes with such warmth and hospitality; when my friends and family here insist that I cannot leave them; I am reminded of the beauty of our unity in Christ despite our differences and the distance that might come between us.

There is a lot of beauty around me that is easy to overlook.  What beauty do you see when you open your eyes?  

Do you know the world is beautiful?

I just got back from a road trip around South Africa with my dear friend Vanessa (pics coming on facebook soon).  Out trip was very outdoorsy, with just about every day that we weren’t driving including a hike of some sort.  Who would have thought this city girl would become a nature lover?  Maybe it has largely to do with the fact that there is a distressing lack of natural beauty around Soshanguve.  There is nowhere that I can easily access (I don’t have a car…) where I can be alone outside.  I’ve felt that loss, and I’ve missed it.  In Greensboro I used to climb a tree or go to a park or arboretum to be alone.  In Miami, I would go to the beach at night and watch the stars while I listened to the waves.  I feel most peaceful when I am outside.  Like the clutter in my head and heart drift away with the tide, like my mind is aired out with the breeze.  Somehow, sitting in my room trying to listen to God is just not the same.

Yet, that’s my only option around here.  The only space I have in which I can be alone is my room.  I could potentially go to one of the few parks in Sosh, but I most certainly would not be left alone.  Being one of a handful of white people in a township of over 1 million doesn’t really allow for me to go anywhere without a bunch of people staring at, hooting at, hitting on, and proposing to me, wanting to talk to me or at least find out what a white girl is doing in the township.  Maybe throw in a concerned Afrikaner lecturing me on how unsafe the township is for white people, and you have my regular outings around Soshanguve.  So, to be alone, to be silent, to seek God, I sit in my ten foot square room, staring at the white ceiling and bare light bulb and trying to hear beyond the sounds of children playing and the dog barking.  It’s not the same.

So it was wonderful to take two weeks of being outside nearly all the time.  Even driving was a pleasure, as there are beautiful views along the way.  It made me realize how much I missed that.  The world is so beautiful!  I miss beauty.  I miss green, and nature, and majesty.  I know there is beauty everywhere, and seek to open my eyes to it, but it gets lost in the dust and the noise of poverty, lost in the day to day grind of survival.  I wonder that no one else feels the loss.  Do they see the beauty my eyes are missing?  The few flowering trees in the spring, the mountains on the taxi ride in to town to work… is that enough for everyone else?  What other option do they have?  Beauty is a luxury, not a right.  And of all those small luxuries I have given up to be here, it is one whose loss I feel the most.