Live to the Beauty in You.

Florida in mid-winter jars the senses.

Charlotte Harbor at sunset.

A trip from the Northeast to Florida in February will leave you reeling, for Florida has not tucked its growth away for a season of rest. It breathes life and color.

Florida rushed at me last week like a 3D, multi-colored, psychedelic production of light, sounds, and smells. The gray of our Pennsylvania winter faded fast in the Florida sunshine. Frankly, breathless and aghast might describe a Northerner's reaction to its teeming life, movement, and fluctuating blues and greens.

I went to Florida to visit friends and soak up the sun's warmth. That happened, but, mostly, I saw God and His hand in and on creation.
I saw Him ...

In rooty mangrove forests, consuming the beaches, providing cover and food for an array of beach critters and plants.

The Gulf of Mexico

In Charlotte Harbor, Sarasota Bay, and the Gulf of Mexico, glistening, shimmering, sparkling, massive, ever dancing beneath the sun, a circumference of original life.

In brown and white pelicans, majestic scions of the skies; ibis, skittering like chickens through the sand; great blue herons, stately, tall before the sea; snowy egrets, tropical snow against the green of mangrove and blue of sea; osprey, searching hawk-like for their next dinner; gulls, noisily littering the sky.

In the crabs, scurrying among the mangrove and burrowing in the sand; in the dolphin, elusive divers on the horizon, and the sheepshead, striped and wiggling on a fisherman's line.

Brown and white pelicans on parade

In the hibiscus, flashing their red, yellow, and orange faces about the landscape; in the royal palm, stately, erect at their hundred foot vantage.

In shells, like our northern snowflakes, each an individual with its own characteristics ... whelks, conch, augur, cockles, pens, barnacles, a plethora of form, shape, texture.

Florida in February is a tribute to the imagination, creativity, and beauty of God. Each of His creations, existing to the beauty God placed within it. 

John Eldridge wrote, "We need beauty; that's clear enough from the fact that God has filled the world with it ... We need to drink in beauty wherever we can get it ... These are all gifts to us from God's generous heart" (Waking the Dead).

The imagination, creativity, and beauty displayed in God's creations are intrinsic to them. They do not struggle to live beautiful. They do not drive to achieve that beauty. They simply are beautiful because God made them that way, and everything God makes is good (1 Timothy 4:4).

"I see beauty in YOU, too," He whispers. "I made you and I saved you from the self that has soiled your living. I live through Christ, My Son, in you. Live to that beauty." The sea, the pelicans, the whelk, the palm, and the dolphin live to the beauty they've been given. "Live to the beauty you are," God reminds us.

Live to Christ in us. Be what He made us to be - Beauty.