Look out your window in the next 24 hours and chances are you’re looking at some incredible fall colors. Gold, red, and green in contrast with a blue sky. Up close the color of the trees is inspiring. The deep gold is vibrant as we gaze up to leaf after leaf that obscures the branches of the tree. There is beauty in a distant view of the trees too. Dots of color all blend together to make a fall palate. The deep greens broken up with golden yellow dark reds peppered in boldly claiming their spot on the palette. No individual leaves, just circles of color in a strip across the horizon. In Colorado we’re treated with a mountain backdrop that makes the whole scene spectacular. This year fall has been the MOST beautiful of any fall I’ve experienced while living in this state.

And as I lean into my appreciation of the season I’m realizing that God created this beauty to reveal himself to us.

We can read the Bible to know that he created the heavens and the earth (Genesis). We can know that he is faithful to his people; originally the Israelites, but now that’s you and me too (found in pretty much the whole rest of the OT) and that his love for us is so great he sent Jesus to die for our sins (found in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John). And God’s holiness is seen peppered all throughout the Bible. The Psalms speak of the beauty around us and in reading them we can absorb that truth.

But it is only in gazing upon the beauty of God’s creation that we can truly appreciate what he is capable of and respond appropriately.

I have this wonderful friend who is a very talented designer. She was a pivotal part of our house build. She took our vision and transformed our ideas into something beautiful. And each time she would walk into our space and behold beautifully laid tile, or new hand pulls on a well crafted vanity, she would squeal and dance with glee. It always made me smile.

What if that’s how we experienced the incredible beauty around us? What if we responded with awe, wonder and yes, glee, at the extraordinary work of God’s hands?

As I spend time outside and soak up the views, I’m reminded of God’s holiness and creativity and just general awesomeness, which has led to awe, which has led to worship. In my wildest dreams I could never have created or imagined such profound beauty in creation. I have always needed inspiration from something to create something beautiful. And yet, God created the world with no template. And he did an exceptional job. Worship has become a reflex when I take in the views of creation and realize the magnitude of God.

In his book As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Eugene Peterson reflects on how beauty helps us to experience God’s holiness.

“Both beauty and holiness are perpetually in short supply. Beauty is commonly trivialized in our culture, reduced to decoration…but beauty is not an add-on. It is not an extra. It is not what we attend to when we have a break from necessity. Beauty is fundamental. It is the evidence of and witness to the inherent wholeness and goodness of things.”

“Beauty is our sensory access to holiness. God reveals himself, that is, in creation and in Christ, in ways we can see and hear and touch and taste, in place and person. Beauty is the term we apply to these hints of transcendence, these perceptions that there is more going on here than we can account for.

God is greater than we can possibly comprehend. And creation bares witness to this every day-in the diversity of color as the leaves change in the fall to the complexity of the human body. Finding beauty around us is not a difficult task, we need only to look for it intentionally.

WHAT IF the Church (and by that I mean you and me) became a people that looked for and recognized beauty? We would find it in the world around us: the extraordinary sunrise which speaks to the faithfulness of God, or a pending storm reminding us of God’s power and protection. What if we looked for beauty and in the midst of it, remembered what that tells us about God?

AND THEN, what if we took that knowledge and remembered that he also instructed us to love people? That might mean we regarded the people in front of us and saw the beauty that God created (his image). What if we spoke life into the discouraged because we saw their beauty? We could accept the lonely because we saw them as God created them and not as the world tarnished.

God wants us to know him. He hasn’t hidden himself from us. He has left his fingerprints all over creation. When we see and experience his beauty and respond it transforms us.