Even Ugly Can Become Beautiful by Bob Jones

  

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the

longing to find the place where all the

beauty came from.” C. S. Lewis

 

“God makes everything beautiful in its own time.”

(Ecclesiastes 3:11)

“What could be more beautiful than people

becoming what God intended them to be and

having some small part as a writer in

their transformation.” NJ Lindquist

You and I may disagree on what is beautiful, but we can agree there is beauty all around us. We all enjoy something pleasing to the eye. Beauty can move and convert your heart to new thought, new faith, and new horizons.

You can find beauty in writing about raising a family, making a marriage work, advancing the causes of justice, and in contexts that range from the mundane to the mysterious. Perhaps the most intriguing beauty may rise, as NJ Lindquist asserts, from some small part you play as a writer in people’s transformation.

Poetry and prose possess a beautiful quality. And even though we can’t always physically see it we know it when we feel it.

And for writers, or any creative for that matter, even ugly can become beautiful.

Start Ugly

As Jason Dauphinee points out in, 10 Uncomfortable Truths For People Who Lead With Heart,

“Never brainstorm sitting still. Start ugly. Write the bad version. Sketch the crooked line. Motion tells your nervous system you’re safe enough to wander— and that’s where the real work begins.”

Writing the "bad version" has been a fruitful writing practise for me. As well, starting with the ugly, the suffering and hardships in life, has been a way to discover beauty.

 

In Home Behind The Sun, authors Timothy Willard and Jason Locy offer a spiritually rich perspective on beauty:

“It’s easy to focus on the brokenness and miss the beauty – to get hung up on the ‘what-if’ of a situation. No matter how dark our world, no matter how many shadows cast their despair on us, beauty remains. No matter how much pain and suffering rise to conquer us, God overwhelms them, causing good to come from even the blackest circumstances.”

Take away all the colours of the rainbow and you won’t get darkness; you get pure and radiant white. No matter how hard you try to black it out, light seeps through the cracks.

Willard and Locy observe that what we see as beautiful points to something else - the thing behind “the thing." It’s not really "the thing" we desire at all. We see beauty and we long for God.

5 Observations of Beauty

1. Our souls were made to run on the practice of worship, law-keeping, truthfulness, honesty, discipline, self-control, and service to God and others, which is beauty.

2. When we live contrary to our designed purpose, we dry up and lose the capacity for beauty.

3. Beauty is in the brilliance of the everyday - in innocence, forgiveness, physicality, deformity, art, music, mathematics, relationships and more.

4. Beauty is that surprising clarity that arrests and liberates our attention, evoking awe and wonder and opening us to the eternal.

5. God is beauty and beauty is love.

 

Which observation stood out to you?

Where do you observe beauty? Please comment at the bottom of this post.

Thank you.

Longing for Beauty by Lorrie Orr

 

June 2026: Writing as beauty. In his book Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, John O'Donahue writes "to participate in beauty is to come into the presence of the Holy." What does creating beauty mean to you and your writing? How have you sensed God's Holy Spirit filling you as he did Bezalel and Oholiab in Exodus 35:30-35?

Beauty is God's invitation to delight in him.

Wonder and awe whisper to us that there is

something beyond, something more.

Steve DeWitt, (Eyes Wide Open)

It's Sunday evening, May 31. Sunlight streams through the window onto the vase of peonies on the dining room table. How beautiful it is. I fill my eyes with the extravagantly ruffled pink and white blossoms while my mind ponders the question of beauty, and the fast-approaching deadline for this post. I had thought this would be an easy post to write, but instead, I've found the topic so vast that it's hard to pull something coherent together.

I have always been appreciative of beautiful things in the world, but it is only in the past few years that I've come to realize that embracing beauty is a personal core value - something that is important to me and that acts as a guiding principle in my life.

When I attended a concert in La Sainte Chapelle in Paris years ago, I marveled at the exquisite beauty of the chapel expressed through architecture, glass, stone, and paint. The music that soared upwards to the curving arches and filled every nook and cranny of the space was equally beautiful. Creative expression is a reminder to me of one way that humans are created in the image of God.

 

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located

will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came

through them, and what came through them was longing...

For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower

we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard,

news from a country we have not yet visited.

C. S. Lewis (The Weight of Glory)

This ache of beauty, this longing I feel, reminds me that I am a spiritual being with a desire for something beyond myself, for that which is greater, for God himself. The Psalmist longs to "gaze upon the beauty of the Lord" throughout his life. The beauty of this world is a reflection of ultimate beauty, of God himself. More than an aesthetic quality, beauty has the most impact on me when I recognize God's presence in the things I experience.

In L. M. Montgomery's The Blue Castle, Barney says "There are so many kinds of loveliness." Beauty comes in myriad forms and I am glad that the Apostle Paul encourages us to think about lovely things. Beauty is multi-sensory, not just the things we see or hear. Human interactions such as watching a mother with her young baby, or cars pulling to the side of the road to let an ambulance by, or a conversation with a grandchild - all of these things, and so much more, are experiences of beauty.

Beauty does not erase the brokenness of this world, but something in me was created to absorb beauty and to recognize its divine source. As a writer, I long for my words to point to the beautiful grace and goodness of God. The goal of beautiful writing is to make the reader feel some emotion. Even when my writing is not explicitly spiritual, when someone reads my words and discovers a longing they cannot perhaps explain, that is beauty.

Lorrie Orr writes from Vancouver Island.

Her first book, Life is Short but Wide, a memoir of 21 years

in Ecuador, was recently published.

More of her writing can be found at 

Substack

her slice of life blog

Where to Write by Brenda J Wood

 

Where do I write? Who knows for sure!
I write on paper, anywhere words endure.
I write on the table. I write when half-dead.
I seldom though sometimes write on my bed.

I write when I'm bushed,
And I write when I’m shushed.
I write on the porch
And even by torch.

I write in a crowd with noise all around.
I’ve written in private, surrounded by sound.
You simply can't stop me. I write 'cause I must.
I’ve even been caught writing on a bus.

I write 'cause I’m able. I write here and there.
I write all my problems and even my care.
How do I do this? See what I said?
Most of my writing is done in my head.

(Top )Image by landsmann from pexels.com

Brenda J Wood has authored more than fifty books. She is a seasoned motivational speaker, who declares the Word of God with wisdom, humour, and common sense.

Woodlawn Blue by Joylene Bailey

 ~~~~~

I've written in many places in my lifetime: at the island in the kitchen as dinner simmers on the stove, on my dining room table before the dishes have been cleared away, in coffee shops, on the front porch in the mornings, in a journal on a cruise ship, on my daughter's couch with a newborn grandbaby in one arm ... and the list goes on. I can write anywhere. But I would say my most creative work happens when and where I can be solitary and uninterrupted. That place is at my desk in the early mornings.

Jane Austen wrote several novels on a portable mahogany writing desk which she placed on a small twelve-sided tripod table. This was in the dining room of the home she shared with her mom and sister. In the movie, Miss Austen Regrets, there's a compelling scene that takes place in this room. I don't know how true it is to Jane's life, but it depicts everything I feel when I am deep into writing and an interruption occurs.

In the scene, Jane is writing at her little desk when sister Cassandra comes in to set the table. Cassandra is being as quiet as one can be with clinking silverware and porcelain plates, but Jane is distracted from her writing. She doesn't move, save for lifting her pen from the page and holding it there until Cassandra leaves the room. Then she begins to write again. It's the action of someone who doesn't want to lose the thought, so she freezes in time to hold onto it until the distraction is done. How I resonate with that! I need quiet, with no interruptions.

I'm pretty sure I'm writing all the time. I'm certainly observing with writing in mind, even when I don't realize I'm doing it.

The way the cashier tucks her hair behind her ear becomes the quirk of a secondary character. Questions my grandkids ask turn into what-ifs. How a certain word rolls off the tongue in the middle of a conversation with the piano tuner fills the blank in my manuscript. It's all fodder.

But the actual sit-down-work-at-my-computer writing happens at home in my favourite room. For years I'd dreamed of this space. It had to be big enough to embrace my quilting, my own library, and a spacious writing desk. This dream was finally realized four years ago when I entered my sixties.

The walls are painted Woodlawn Blue, with trim in Cloud White. Large windows on two walls face north and east, letting in golden sunrises and lots of light. Wafting breezes billow the lace curtains. If that sounds idyllic, it is, even when quilting projects clutter the sewing table and resource books crowd my desk. It's a place where I can close the door if I need to, when I don't want to be interrupted. My best work happens here. It's my sacred space.

I come here in the mornings, when the light shining through the windows sweeps the bookshelves with a golden pink glow and tiptoes across the floor into the living room beyond. The only distractions come from outside: birds chirping in season, our neighbour's rooster cock-a-doodling, the odd coyote howling in the distance. However, these are less distractions than they are reminders that God is over all. It's here, in this sacred space, where I feel His pleasure when I write.

Jane Austen might have wished for a more private place to write, at a proper desk with an ergonomic chair. But maybe not. After all, she managed to write seven novels that have remained popular for over two hundred years, mostly on a little twelve-sided table. Would she have considered that her sacred space?

I finished this post on my granddaughter's tenth birthday, in my daughter's bright living room. At times it was noisy and chaotic with excitement. So yes, I can write anywhere, but I do write best at home, in my sacred space of Woodlawn Blue.

~~~~~

Feature Photo from Pixabay

Joy writes from her Woodlawn Blue writing space in lake country, Alberta, where she lives with The Cowboy and their livestock - a dog and two cats. As a gentle encourager, she writes short stories, articles, and poetry for adults, and stories for children. She is working on a longer work of fiction. Find more of her joy-infused writing at Scraps of Joy.