As I'm sure you remember, our friend Kaylie works in Kenya with an American-based organization called BuildaBridge. Her main job in Kenya is to teach art to the disadvantaged kids living in the slums. Art may seem unnecessary for children living in poverty, but it actually teaches them to see beauty around them, regardless of the view in front of them.
The kids we worked with live in Mathare, a slum that is home to more than half a million people. Their “houses” are tiny, one-room shacks made with corrugated tin for roofs and walls. The paths through the slum are paved with every kind of garbage and are soggy from contaminated water and sewage. The sights and smells are overpowering and it’s easy to despair for those who live there.
But these precious children are not overwhelmed by the desperation of their circumstances. They still find beauty in their world. Every week, at the beginning of art class, they are asked to share one good thing and one bad thing from their week. Every week, their recollection of the good outnumbers the bad. They see good in glitter – in gleeful delight using it to decorate their art projects and then themselves. They marvel at the buzz of kazoos and eagerly try to figure out how to play them. Little things, counted as good and seen as beauty.
Maybe these children should have been teaching me. How many times have I let my circumstances dictate my emotions? I get sick, quarrel with a friend, or miss my bus, and my joy slips away. James 1:2 says that we can “count it all joy.” What an encouragement, for if joy is dependent on the situations surrounding us, then there could be no joy, no beauty in Mathare. And yet every Saturday I spent in Mathare I heard reports to the contrary: the good outnumbered the bad, the beauty outweighed the burden.
Like James said, we can count everything as joy. We can choose to see beauty everywhere. Eyes that seek it will find it, as the children in Mathare showed me, and a heart turned toward beauty will never fail to be thankful and joyful.
(Katherine)
