“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
- JRR Tolkien, Return of the King
A little after 12:30pm today, I received a voicemail from a good friend. In his message, he told me he was just around the corner from the restaurant at which we had agreed to meet. But, there was a problem. I was not at the restaurant. I was nowhere near the restaurant. In fact, I had already eaten and was on my way to a coffeeshop to get some work done. I completely forgot that we had made plans to eat lunch together. What a jerk, right?
If you have seen me much in person and are very observant, you may have noticed that I tend to write notes on my hand. I have a terrible memory, especially when it comes to scheduling, as proven by my poor hungry friend (I was supposed to buy lunch too - doubly bad!). When we made plans, I did not have a pen on me. My hand remained a clean slate and my lunch hour unscheduled. One thing led to another, a host of other concerns and priorities consumed my mind, and I was given another opportunity to apologize for my disorganization.
I tell you this not purely for self-disclosure but also in the knowledge that I am not alone. We live in a culture of perpetual motion. We have no shortage of meetings that occupy our time, stimuli that occupy our minds, and worries that occupy our hearts. We spend long hours working at our jobs, only to return home and find more work awaiting us most days. We exist in bigger, broader networks of people than did our grandparents, each relationship clamoring for our time and attention. We are beset by more information than generations past, including more than 3,000 commercial advertisements each day for the average college student.
Surrounded by all this swirling chaos, it is sometimes easy to feel overwhelmed. No wonder we often wrestle to find time to be still and wrestle further with what to do when we do find a quiet moment. As the school year draws near, I find myself with growing to-do lists and shrinking hours in which to do the multitude of tasks it takes to begin a college ministry each year. I worry we will not finish planning in time to welcome the first round of freshmen to campus. No matter how many years we somehow manage to get everything done in time, I still worry.
In the middle of the late July administrative storm, I find myself looking for safe harbor, a place to be reminded that the fate of the world is not contingent upon whether we give out water bottles or watermelon when freshmen take their campus tour. When this happens, I often find solace in small, unexpected places - in the line of a poem or the page-turn of a novel or the lyric of a song. I find it in Art, in Beauty. Beauty reminds me simultaneously of both my tiny view of the world around me and God's Good Story surging forward always and ever around me. It whispers to me that even my laptop cannot hold the mysteries, the intricacies, the glorious complexity of the flowers outside my window. I wonder sometimes if this is why a busy king like David took the time to write songs when he had a people to govern, battles to fight, and a kingdom to run. Maybe the Psalms are a collection of David's "Life-is-crazy-right-now" journal entries. Beauty reminds me that while I may be overwhelmed by the first weeks of September here in the last weeks of July, God is not. He knows the name of every freshmen coming to campus. He was working in their hearts long before they met us and he will continue long after they graduate.
As the pace of life quickens, I am reminded of my need for Beauty. I am beginning to understand that it is the Artist who sets our eyes to the sky and the Preacher our feet to the ground. We need both in our lives. In my job, I seem to listen more to the voices of the Preachers than the Artists. There is always more to do - more meetings to plan, more phone calls to make, more students to meet - and these are all excellent activities, certainly worthy of our time as missionaries. But, like Martha in Luke 10, I tend to do for Jesus to the detriment of being with Jesus. Beauty calls me out of my Martha-esque, task-driven, graceless understanding of my job and sets me eyes and heart on the Good Story that makes the job worth doing. It softly sings a melody underneath the vibration of my cell phone and the bustle of the coffeeshop: Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again. I stop, even for a moment, and try to remember the tune.
