The Beautiful and The Sad

#94

Friend,

I know you are sad today.

I know you’ve been sad for a while.

There is a gift to sadness because we mostly grieve beautiful things. As Andy Crouch says, “The beautiful and the sad are very connected.”

I’ve been thinking about this, and I've been thinking about you. Of course, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and so others may not understand your grief because they don’t understand your perspective.

Grief exists in the space that beauty used to hold.

It may have been a beautiful person or relationship. It may have been a beautiful experience or season. It may have been an expectation or a hope. It may have even been a feeling or a longing that you had. When that beauty ends, then grief occupies that gap.

Sometimes when we look back, and we realize that what we thought was beautiful 25 years ago or 25 days ago doesn’t look as good in hindsight. Sometimes when we look back, it looks even more beautiful, and we might grieve a little more because that gap widened a bit more in our reflection. That’s normal.

Ultimately, I just want you to remember that in your grief today, it’s because beauty lived, and I invite you to be grateful for that. And I invite you to look for the beauty that surrounds you today. One of the side effects of grief is that blurry eyes looking backward make it hard to see what is happening right in front of you.

Love,

Aaron