We had an Easter picnic yesterday. We picked one of the most beautiful settings we know.

Tilled up dirt, stacked hoses, a greenhouse and plastic tomato water cages may not look like beauty, especially with the dead grass and the brown trees all around.

It looks different when you and your wife and children spent a hard three days tilling and planting and setting it all up. Then you can see the beauty. Beauty is not something outside ourselves. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” isn’t relativism, its just a fact about what beauty is and how it happens.

It looks different when you know what the grass will look like later in the spring, and what the tomatoes will taste like in the fall.

Beauty is not static. It has echoes from the past and from the future.

It weaves in and out of our lives.