"Three things will last forever--faith, hope, and love--and the greatest of these is love." -1 Corinthians 13:13. These are the three things that should matter to us more than anything, and the greatest of these? Of course- love. Everyone knows that. But what is love?
To figure out what love is, we have to look at what we love. Let's face it, what we love beauty. There's no changing that, don't fight it, you know it. We only love what is beautiful.
What is beauty? This would be the next question on the string of thought. I'll tell you what beauty is, but it's not a pretty picture. (Don't pardon the pun.)
There was once a study done, where they took several people's faces and averaged them out. And in every test, the average face was always voted far more beautiful than all the other faces. Beauty is being average. For all our schools and posters and tv shows talk about sticking out, and being original, being different, we only love what is average. We cling to the familiar, scared of the different and unknown. It's just a fact of life.
Is this really what beauty is in our country? Is this really what love is? Is this really all that matters? Being average? There has to be more.
Luckily, there are other types of beauties to fall back on. The starry sky, or a wide open plain. A painting or a song by an artist. Things like this that flow through you, that stir something inside of you. This is love.
This is all very well and good, but if that's the only kind of beauty you trust in, then what of man? Should we all just give up on each other and retreat to distant mountains, or untread fields? By no means! We all need human society, we crave it. If we give up on man, then we give up everything. We have to find another type of beauty. A beauty harder to find than the first two. A deeper beauty. An inner beauty. We have to stare into the eyes of strangers passing on the streets and wonder what it's like to be in their shoes, see through their eyes. We have to picture what their families are like, who cares about them and who would miss them if they weren't there. We have to picture them with souls like our own, who want and feel and hurt and fear. Who crave love as much as we do. Only then, when we can see this inner beauty, and see our fellow men as sisters and brothers through Christ, can we love and hope and have faith for man kind.
And in the end, those are the only things that matter.
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