You Are So Beautiful

Almost every day, Eilidh asks if she may go for a ride with her daddy in his truck. This morning she was granted this wish and rode shotgun on a trip into town to the hardware store with Daddy. As we started back up Walker Mountain on the way home, Eilidh said to me, "Remember, Daddy, this is our mountain." Now she says a great many cute things. But this was not one of them. This was profoundly beautiful to my ears.

That which is cute is necessarily temporary and fleeting. It is artificial and immature. When Eilidh sings "You Are So Beautiful to Me" staring into my eyes with her hands on my cheeks while I push her in the buggy down the grocery aisles, this is blushingly cute. But her reminder to me this morning is the early fruit of a determined labor of her mother's and mine to cultivate some permanent things.

When Eilidh says, “This is our mountain,” she does not know whether that means that this place belongs to us or means that we belong to this place. The beautiful thing is neither do I. And this particular ambiguity is quite deliberate. More important to me than this place staying the family for generations is that she learn to have an eye for true beauty and an ear for beautiful truth and that she teach this to her own ones and do it all for the glory of our Father.

JD

posted by Jonathan Daugherty 11:56 PM