beauty on Encouragement

God of the heavens and the earth, Giver of sun and showers, wind and calm: We praise You for Your grace and power, Your beauty, grace and care. You sustain us daily, and encourage us constantly. Than...

“You need a certain dose of inspiration, a ray from on high, that is not in ourselves, in order to do beautiful things.”

“[Zach] had gone from seeing beauty in the midst of suffering to creating it. He had taken this thing that could have suffocated him with despair and stripped it down until all that was left was hope....

Lifeless are our prayers. Dry and brittle are our spirits. Like Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones, we are a people without the sinews of goodness, the flesh of holiness, and the breath of righteousness. W...

"God's joy," said by the Persian mystic Rumi, "moves from unmarked box to unmarked box, from cell to cell. As rain water down into flower bed. As roses up from ground. Now it looks ...

How goodness heightens beauty!

Gracious God, for the goodness and beauty of creation we thank you. For the way your creation nurtures and inspires us, we are grateful. Yet, the more we pay attention to the world, the more we see i...

How great and glorious You are, O God. There is no one like You. You transform our weakness into strength. You forgive our stubbornness and arrogance, and fill us with Your generous wisdom. You turn o...

Gracious God, thank you for the beauty of this world. Sometimes we can get wrapped up in its pain and brokenness so much that we miss its wonders. Today we pause to thank you for the beauty of your cr...

O heavenly Father, who has filled the world with beauty: Open our eyes to your gracious hand in all your works; so that, rejoicing in your whole creation, we may learn to serve you with gladness; for ...

When we lose sight of beauty our struggle becomes tired and functional. When we expect and engage the Beautiful, a new fluency is set free within us and between us. The heart becomes rekindled and our...

Leader: May the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ give you the one great thing that you seek: that you may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of your lives, and that you may gaze upon H...

In their excellent book on reconciliation, Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice share a story about how small acts of beauty, done well, can lead to reconciliation: A friend told us of visiting a very l...

​If there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character. If there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home. If there is harmony in the home, there will be o...

Each of us, Lord, has failed to fully observe your beauty. We fall in love with our own image and are left disappointed and alone. Please be faithful to us, Jesus, even when we turn from You. We...

Our task is not to protest the world into a certain moral conformity, but to attract the world to the saving beauty of Christ.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Beauty awakens the soul to act.

Leader: The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? People: One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after...

"The power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely."

All: Oh Lord, my Light, my Life, my Joy, my Peace—with you I find refuge from danger, shelter from the storms in my life. You are good and you do good. You are the Strength of my life, and I look to y...

If the too obvious, too straight branches of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot reach the light—yet perhaps the . . . unexpected branches of Beauty will make their way through and soar...

Recently, when I was in London, I went to the National Gallery. It was a weekday, but it was still crowded with people wearing headsets, staring at famous paintings, listening to a narrator explain th...

Every cross adorning a church is in itself a sermon—a sermon proclaiming that if Christ can transform the Roman instrument of execution into a thing of beauty, there is hope that in Christ all things ...

In his book, Blue Like Jazz , Don Miller tells the story of his time as an evangelical Christian at the extremely liberal Reed College in Portland, Oregon. A part of the underlying theme of the boo...

Lord God, You have created us all in Your image and have loved your creation with an everlasting and costly love. But all too often we are blind and fail to see Your image in others. We exclude those ...

A moment of grace lies in all beauty: it shows itself to me far beyond what I have a right to expect, which is why we feel astonishment and adoration.

May the Lord of love keep us all in peace, transform our conflict into the beauty of his grace, and give us joyful hearts to do his will. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. A...

Goodness is beauty in the best estate.

A hunger for beauty is at its heart a hunger for God.