Light

Yesterday morning when I woke up I took a few minutes to just sit and look out my window. I was looking specifically at this one tree across the street from my apartment complex; it is a huge tree with broad foliage. At this point in the year the leaves are a mixture of yellows and browns. The lighting when I first started studying this tree lacked impressionability. Then I noticed something wonderful was happening: the sun started to crest the mountains; as the sun rose higher the leaves started to ignite with light starting from the outer edges and slowly creeping to fill each leaf. This tree, which only moments before had been rather lackluster, now was stunningly beautiful glittering in the early morning's light.

As I watched this process occur I began to ponder on the application of this scene to my life. People are much like this tree: we are creations of God, indeed we are His children. As such we have an inherent beauty and divinity in our physical form. However, like this tree, when we are filled with light we become immeasurably more beautiful. Literally, the Holy Ghost enhances everything about us:

"The gift of the Holy Ghost...quickens all the intellectual faculties, increases, enlarges, expands and purifies all the natural passions and affections; and adapts them, by the gift of wisdom, to their lawful use. It inspires, develops, cultivates and matures all the fine-toned sympathies, joys,  tastes, kindred feelings, and affections of our nature. It inspires virtue, kindness, goodness, tenderness, gentleness, and charity. It develops beauty of person, form and features. It tends to health, vigor, animation, and social feeling. It invigorates all the faculties of the physical and intellectual man. It strengthens, and gives tones to the nerves. In short, it is, as it were, marrow to the bone, joy to the heart, light to the eyes, music to the ears, and life to the whole being" (Key to the Science of Theology, 9th ed. [1965], 101).

Watching this tree was a poetically beautiful reminder that we are children of light; that "trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our Home" (William Wordsworth, Ode: Imitations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (1884), 23-24).