Our family recently traveled to Guatemala to visit old friends and familiar places. It’s hard to believe it has been almost nine years since we lived there! Of course, this trip brought back all sorts of memories.
One of those memories is of the town where we lived during the year Susan and I turned ten. That was the year that we moved back to Guatemala after spending most of our childhood in Wisconsin. While we were waiting for construction of our house to get far enough along for us to move into it, we lived in an apartment in a nearby town.
Now Guatemala is an extraordinarily beautiful country, generally speaking, but this specific town...Well, the dirt roads made everything incredibly dusty. There really were no beautiful tropical plants; everybody concreted as much of their land as possible. Broken glass soda bottles stood watch on the concrete block wall around our apartment, deterring any “clever” visitors. Drunks would bang on the metal gate at odd hours. Besides the drunks, there were the mangey street dogs. If you walked down the dusty/muddy street, there was trash and all sorts of icky, smelly things along the side. And the radio station above our apartment provided a background to the roosters, motorcycles, cars and trucks that went by. Oh, and inside the apartment you had to watch out or the rough finish on the walls would scrape you - not to mention the Amazon-worthy spiders who might show up above your head.
So sorry for the glass-half-empty approach, but as little girls those were the things that we noticed. All of those details combined prompted us to make up a new name for this town. In Spanish, it was “Feotenango”. Loosely translated, that means Uglyville. Uncharitable and pessimistic perhaps, but, in our culture-shocked opinions, decidedly honest...and funny enough to make us smile, which was worth a lot.
Yet, with all of it’s ugliness, we began learning a lesson in Uglyville that has had a huge impact on our lives. The revelation was that beauty is important. Ugliness makes people want to give up and go back to bed. More importantly, God loves beauty and beauty is important to Him. (Psalm 50:2, Psalm 27:4, Psalm 96:6, Exodus 28:2) It was only after Adam and Eve’s sin that life got ugly (Genesis 3). Furthermore, we reflect Him as we, by His grace, make life beautiful again (Exodus 28:2, part of the “dominion mandate” in Genesis 1:28 and Psalm 8).
Thankfully, our mom knew how important beauty is and helped us start making as much of our little life more beautiful as we could. It was somewhat like being Laura Ingalls: simple but pretty things became special. Daddy and some friends made our beds, and we painted the plywood our favorite colors and put the prettiest knobs that we could find on the drawers underneath. We painted little bookcases to match. With cardboard boxes, we made a house for our American Girl dolls, and had a delightful time decorating it. The dolls lovely clothes gave us no end of delight.
Once we moved into our own home, life got better because we could do whatever we wanted with the house and we actually had a yard for growing fabulous flowers. Bougainvillea vines look so much better on top of walls than broken bottles while serving the same purpose! Our goal was to make our home a place where other people could enjoy beauty, too. We hope they did.
So, in the end, we’re grateful for Uglyville because it taught us how special beauty really is and that, wherever God plants us, perhaps we can help make life a little bit more beautiful. As a wise albeit fictitious character says in the Lamplighter Theatre version of The Basket of Flowers, “It is our duty as Christians to make whatever place He leads us to more beautiful.” (Track 7 starting at 0:44)
With all this in mind, we’re excited to start a series on “Making Life More Beautiful”. Lord willing, we’ll be posting more thoughts, ideas and projects in the days ahead, but we would love to hear your thoughts as well!
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