Tag Archives: Mission San Juan Capistrano

Day 28: Beauty in a broken world

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How do we find ourselves at Palm Sunday again? Western Christians celebrate it today, and I wanted to give a nod in today’s photo to what is always a hard week for me. I love Easter, but Palm Sunday always leaves me a bit sad. Sure, there’s Jesus’ triumphal entry riding on the donkey with crowds waving palms and shouting His praises. But the days between Palm Sunday and Easter are not jubilant. The crowd turns. One of the men closest to Jesus betrays him. Jesus ends up on a cross, dead. It’s a comfort, in a terrible week like that, to have the Easter message to hold on to.

Resurgam: I will rise again.

A sign above a door at Mission San Juan Capistrano

As I’ve done each Sunday in this month-long series, I’ve stepped back into the past by wandering through old trip photos. I took more traditionally beautiful pictures during my visit to Mission San Juan Capistrano several years ago. But this photo’s message is the most beautiful I could choose for today and for the week ahead.

Join me in the hunt for beauty?
Where do you see beauty in a broken world? Want to add your own images during what’s left in the 31-day journey? If so, feel free to comment below with your Instagram handle, and tag your Insta posts with #beautyinabrokenworld. You’ll find me there @pixofhope.

Something that doesn’t love a wall

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One of my favorite poems is Mending Wall by Robert Frost. There’s a good chance you studied it in a high school English class, but it’s one of the most often misunderstood poems around. It begins:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it …

Perhaps too many students forget the beginning by the middle of the poem and drift into daydreaming by the end of it. And, therefore, they forget the whole point of the poem.

While you’ll often hear the line “Good fences make good neighbors,” from the poem, the line was the exact opposite of Frost’s main message. The narrator in the poem wanted his neighbor to think beyond their annual tradition of meeting to repair the wall, to understand that, simply because the neighbor’s father had fed him the “Good fences” line for many years, they didn’t need the wall between them. His neighbor refused to listen and doggedly repeated what his father had taught him about good fences.

Some fences are good and necessary. Here a fence keeps sheep and goats penned in until they can get their dose of medicine. The sheep stares out through the fence as if saying, “I don’t love this wall.”FurryFirefighters2016_3FT

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