“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
That saying has been around for a long time, dating back to at least the late 1800s. It says that beauty varies according to different people’s perceptions. What is beautiful to one person might not be so attractive to someone else
Someone else said, “Seeing is believing.” But that too is subjective, because we are capable of not believing what we see or believing what we don’t see. Jesus said to Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen me, yet believe” (John 20:29). How is that possible?
I have learned from a few blind people that “seeing” goes beyond what our eyes behold. We have other senses that reveal the world around us. Helen Keller was both deaf and blind, yet at times, she recognized a person walking into the room. How? Perhaps by feeling the person’s measured steps upon the hardwood floor.
In my book Eyewitness: The Life of Christ Told in One Story, I invited readers to “take a hard look at an invisible God,” suggesting that we can see more than what meets the eye. If we want to, we can sense God’s presence and talk to him, knowing that he never misses a word. He even knows our thoughts (Psalm 139:2).
“Imagination” says we can see with our minds as well as our eyes, but our spiritual perceptions go beyond the realm of logic. The apostle Paul said we know we are God’s children because his Spirit confirms in our spirit the reality of our relationship (Romans 8:16). How does that work? For me, answering that is like explaining why the lights come on when I flip the switch. To know it works, I don’t have to know how or why.
The more I walk with the Lord, the better I know him. And the better I know him, the more beautiful he is to me, more wonderful than words can express.
But I try.
In 1975, Joe Cocker popularized the song “You are so Beautiful,” written by Billy Preston and Bruce Fisher. Those words do well at describing how I feel about the Lord.