Your prison is also your paint box

Picture is Niagra Falls and of course it goes without saying that the picture never captures it...it is beauty, as it's best.

Here is a little "treasure" that I found in Frank Laubach's "Letters by a Modern Mystic." (BTW, if you do not know it, YOU MUST GET IT TODAY!!!) Almost every word in the entire book is "treasure" worthy. During his time as a missionary in the Philippines, he writes letters to his father about the experiment that he beings in 1930 of living moment-by-moment in conscious communion with God. This particular part of a letter was recalling an experience he had while looking at a sunset over the water with his dog "Tip." (page 50-51)

"I patted Tip's head as he nestled up under my arm, and told him: 'we are two tiny insects in the midst of this terrifying universe. I know a little more than you do, you nice black dog, but not much more. Compared with he gigantic Being who wheels these awful spheres of fire through the sky, I am as near nothing as you are. I know as little about God as you know about me, perhaps ten thousand times less. And perhaps you are wiser than I, for you are contented to be patted on the head and to hunt for fleas, while I am impatient to break loose into the universe. I thought, Tip, when I was younger, that Kant was wrong when he said that the three greatest moral demands are God, freedom, and immortality, but now I believe he was incredibly right. My soul at fourty-six demands immortality as much as it demands God. And it demands freedom from this prison we call the world and the flesh as much as it demands immortality.' Then out of the skies there came a silent voice, 'Your black clouds give the sun its chance. It is surprise, it is escape from darkness to like that makes life so rich. Your prison is also your paint box from which all the beauty you know is pouring. Lanao, where you now sit, is one of the most beautiful creations in all the reaches of space. And there you have the privilege of opening eyes to see beauty, which otherwise would not see. It is selfish of you to desire to escape, until you can take humanity with you. You are not Christlike until you demand that even after you die, your soul shall stay and help others come through to the larger life. I almost fear that my nightly visions, much as I love to give them to you, are making you more selfish, more hungry to get, less eager to give. The most beautiful thing in the universe for you is Lanao stretching around this lake at your fee, for it contains the beauty of immense need. You must awaken hunger there, for until they hunger they cannot be fed."

God's beauty is all around us and when we open our eyes and see what all is at our finger tips...wherever we sit, stand, work, sleep, eat, drive, shop, etc... is filled with beauty...even, or perhaps especially, in the people that God has put right here.