There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,

Ecclesiastes 3:1, 4

I know. I wasn’t going to write here. Too busy writing study guides. But things come up and sometimes one simply must write. Sometimes life is such that one needs to give expression to what goes on in one’s heart and soul. Today is one of those days.

I wasn’t feeling well this morning, grieving the fact that I have a mental illness that causes me to say strange things and act in strange ways. Although I’m a real person and want people to see me as the real person I am – someone who loves others and means well, I wonder if people realize that I’m aware that I’m odd at times and wish I weren’t.

This morning I grieved all this has done to my life. All this has cost me – and my husband as well.

And I think to myself how important it is that I and the friends who suffer in this way remember that we are God’s children. Loved the way we are. Recognized by him to be who he made us to be inside. Known by him. Seen for the beauty we have inside us. Beauty he put there. Beauty that will always be there, no matter what.

God has taught me that he loves us and will always love us. Every bit as much as he loves the most perfect human being. And yet the tearfulness remains.

I picked up my camera and started photographing the lilies we bought a few days ago. Lilies, way past their prime already, but photogenic nevertheless. I could not stop. I would put my camera down, only to pick it up a short time later, making the best pictures I knew how. Though tearful, I was celebrating something – beautiful flowers. Beautiful, even as they were getting ready to die.

There’s a beauty in everything, isn’t there? If we would only allow God to show it to us. If only we would recognize it.

Beauty in every season.