the face of God

"These experiences can shake us up and scramble our tidy worldviews. We might suppress the images from our minds and go on with our lives with no change.  Or we might allow our souls to be stirred at the very core, and our thinking and our lives cannot remain the same."

-Skip Lee 

One of the things about any trip to another part of the world is that it offers the invitation to see people and places that are vastly different than my own daily experience.  In India, each day, I saw people who were stunning in their beauty- inside and out.  Amy and I remarked often how we saw women doing manual labor in their lovely saris and how we would find that to be so difficult to work in those clothes. We also saw girls walking down the dirt streets looking like they could be ready to go to a ball even though they were just heading to the market or going about their daily lives.  

The colors, sparkles and beauty in India is so unique. 

One of the things that I was thinking about on the way home yesterday is that such a trip like this where I saw such beauty in places and in people there allows me to come home with fresh eyes and see the beauty once again around me here in this place and in these people who are here in my city, in my neighborhood, in my home... 

It's all too easy to go through a day taking things for granted and missing the beauty around us.  I am thankful for the face of God which became so clear to me in India in the people I met. And I am thankful that this experience can help me more readily recognize the face of God right before me in those I encounter today.