See A Butterfly Everyday

For a program in my building, we attempted to complete an "I am beautiful" Challenge. I didn't complete it, and most of us didn't. But all of us had it change some part of our lives. And that was the point. It was ten days long and each challenge was another way to learn about what beauty is and act on it in our lives. One day's challenge was particularly meaningful to me. For this particular day, I was supposed to take as much time preparing in the morning on the inside as I do preparing on the outside.

I don't take much time to prepare on the outside in the morning. I do pretty good to get out of bed these days. Most of my time is spent on the inside convincing myself to get up and do things. Every morning I think of a question trivial or profound, and I look at the world through the lens of my question each day and usually find something meaningful by the end of the day.

So the challenge didn't require too much change on my part in the way I was thinking about it, but it did make me think of what it means to prepare on the inside. Most people prepare on the outside to make themselves feel confident and beautiful. How can I feel beautiful on the inside when I don't feel like life's events lately are very beautiful? This was my question. A theme in my life has been that the good die young. I have more experience with that than I hope anyone else around me here at BYU has to experience. These people are beautiful, and them leaving life so young is not so beautiful for me, even though it may be for them. It's heartshredding to me.

Every evening I do something that helps me see beauty in life. I have talked about it before. Golden time. Sometimes I watch it in real life. I drop everything when I see slivers of gold slip through my window and dance on my white walls. I go for a walk with God and He takes me by the hand into an empty field and says, "Watch this with me." and He turns my world gold. And other days, when the sun is hidden, I go there in my mind before I say my prayers and go to bed.

This makes me think of Carmody. Mike said she had a goal to "see a butterfly everyday," even if that meant she had to see a dead one at the Bean Museum. Maybe that is like my golden time. My favorite kind of simple beauty in life. All that is beautiful brings me back to that feeling in a moment of Golden Time. My proverbial butterfly. My goal is to "see Golden Time everyday." I'm trying to train my vision. When life gets ugly, I guess I have to take the beauty in. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right? Even when the world is ugly, I'm glad God made my insides beautiful enough to view the world through golden-colored lenses of my heart.

And that goes for you, too.