A little while ago (seriousy, like an hour ago) I had lunch with two gentlemen. It was a pre-arranged lunch, through a friend of a friend, where they wanted to talk to me about something… business or insurance or steak knives. All I really know is that I got free fish tacos.

What really struck me was how quickly these guys, obviously adept salesman, tried to get to know me. Now, did they really care to know me? Who knows. But they asked a ton of questions, candidly related it to their own stories, and relentless took interest in everything I said.

It got me thinking about this:

I had a few minutes and just a handful of statements to make about my life.

How do I condense my life down to  a 5-10 minute conversation?

How would you?

I was with two guys I had never met, and I essentially had a blank slate to tell anything or everything about my life. The conversation was dictated by some odd combination of guardedness, efficiency, truth, and creativity.

How do you tell your story?

What’s most important? Perhaps you don’t even know.

Where would you allow yourself to expand into minutia?

What makes your story spectacular & worth telling?

What will people connect with & what won’t they get?

The way you lay your story out deeply impacts how you form relationships. It is a deeply spiritual way of entering into the worlds of others.

How do you tell your story?

What’s beautiful? 

What’s ugly?

If you want to figure out what the beautiful things in life are…. maybe if you want to act prophetically and point to what’s beautiful and what’s counterbeautiful….you could question beauty.

Beauty, simply put, is the quality in something that elicits satisfaction and pleasure.

Beauty has a lot of trappings laid upon it. It can easily devolve into lust, infatuation, or pride. 

Beauty, with a Godward direction, is the breaking through of all that’s good and wonderful. It is that satisfying and pleasurable knowledge, understanding, and/or feeling that all is as it should be. 

Is this what it means for God to look at the Creation and call it good? 

Maybe we could question beauty.

We could look at our lives, and the lives of those around us, and the lives of those in our city (and on and on..), and we could question beauty.

Beautiful?

Counterbeautiful? 

Is the beauty of God breaking through?

Or is it counterfeited, sabotaged, and shattered?

We could question beauty. And then we could cultivate, steward, and even create it. We could point to it and exhort it.

We must make Godward beauty a pursuit of our hearts.