by Anna Mondal
“Stop and smell the roses,” they say. As if you didn’t have eighty-eight thousand tasks, as if you didn’t have deadlines or drama or diapers. In our rapid-fire, tech-oriented society, who has the luxury of stopping to sit in nature like a bohemian free spirit? Even in the modern art world, flowers are considered frivolous subjects to paint – flowers make no social critique, flowers don’t say shocking things, so flowers are not “serious art.”[1]
Yet, Jesus invites us to consider wildflowers (Matt. 6:28). Have we dismissed flower-admiring as frivolous, unimportant to our “serious” lives? Is it possible that contemplation of God-made beauty could lift an anxious soul?
Slow Down, Look Up
From well-warranted terror to social anxiety, we all know fear. Fear upticks our heartbeat, breathing, and agitates our thoughts. Fear speeds us up, and shrinks the world down to the size of our anxieties: “I can’t leave the house, something bad will happen,” or, “If I don’t finish my to-do list, I’m a bad human being.” When our fears loom large, our life is small.
To hear God’s truth, we must slow down and learn to be still. Makoto Fujimura encourages people to look at
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