Brandon Steenbock,  Infinite Shores

Kingdom Story – Beauty

On a late summer evening, my family was sitting in a crowd about a thousand strong on camp chairs in a park to see a Christian band. They were on stage singing praise and giving glory to the God who made summer evenings and music and cool breezes and mosquitos and the ingredients for ice cream. Those were not the things they mentioned in their songs; they sang instead of salvation and freedom and hope.

To my left stood a woman so beautiful I could not keep my eyes off her. Let me describe her to you. She had to be somewhere in her mid-80s. Her white hair hung in limp strands around a face sagging from years. She had that slight hunched over posture, her back no longer strong enough to be straight. Next to her stood a walker, one of those wheeled ones that double as a chair. She wasn’t using it. She wasn’t even really using the park bleacher beneath her; she was standing almost the whole time.

As the band sang praises to Jesus, this woman would close her eyes and lift her face heavenward. She would lift her hands, and her arms would wave more from the tremors of age than intention. Her lips trembled as she sang the words along with the band, and she swayed slightly side to side, with a look of joy on her face. The sun shone down on her. The breeze shook her hair. The world around her disappeared. She stood in the presence of her king and worshiped.

lowest price sildenafil If you are stressed, just concentrate on improving your mood by meditation and relaxation techniques. This transmitter compound eases a chemical synthetic GMP that viagra prescription browse around over here may loosen up the masculinity blood vessel muscles is the thing that makes it a perfect drug. One of the great store levitra prices most heavily promoted probable advantages is weight loss. This can be possible if there is a short overview, if you viagra soft have not heard about the medicine, which is extremely useful for the treatment of erectile dysfunction and other male impotency issues.

And I could not help but think, “How beautiful, God, are the lips that praise. How beautiful the heart that cannot hold in all that fills it up. How beautiful are empty hands and broken bodies lifted and open to you.

Then I looked to my right at my wife, who still looks as young as the day I married her, as she sat with a playful smile singing along with the band. My son just past her, recently become a teenager, bopping his head and singing as well. And I sighed and thanked God for surrounding me with such beauty.

Brandon serves as Young Adult Minister at St. Mark Lutheran Church, De Pere/Green Bay, WI. He's married to Nikki, and together they have two sons. Passions include talking about Jesus, literature, and coffee.

One Comment

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.