By Jessica Brodie

Standing on the Carolina coast, my toes dug firmly into the sand, I searched for seashells with my daughter. Our plan was to collect enough to make some sort of craft—a mosaic or shell jar, something pretty to remind us of the sweet summer memories we shared.

Beneath the surf I spotted one that almost made me gasp. Pearl white with a hint of purple, its iridescence gleamed brilliantly in the soft sunlight. I gazed at the shell, awestruck by its beauty. Into our shell bag it went.

Yet later, searching through the shells, I couldn’t find it. When I finally did, none of that iridescence stood out to me. It wasn’t even a gleaming white but rather a plain pale gray, its surface rough and not nearly what I’d seen on that seashore.

In fact, none of the shells looked as they’d first appeared beneath the gentle surf. They seemed just pretty but rather plain seashells now. They still had value—I know they’ll make a lovely mosaic or shell craft when we put them together. The shell, of course, was still the same shell, still beautiful. All of God’s creation is. But without the sunlight and the water, I simply couldn’t see what I’d seen on the shore. The beauty hadn’t disappeared—I just no longer had the light to see it. I couldn’t help but wish I had some of that “sunlight vision” again, able to see the glory that’s really there in the mundane.

In a sense, it reminds me of how all of us appear without God’s special “sparkle”—just regular human beings. We’re muscle and skin draped over bones, bodies walking around on this earth, not terribly special on our own. Our “specialness,” our value, comes from what’s within. That sparkle, that beauty, that vibrance of life and joy and hope, it all comes from the Lord. Yet without God’s light, we can’t see that worth, the specialness he’s placed in people.

It reminds me of Samuel in the Old Testament, who was told by the Lord to get his oil and horn and head to Bethlehem, where he’d be anointing one of Jesse’s sons as king to replace Saul (1 Samuel 16). Samuel did as God asked, and when he encountered Jesse’s son Eliab, he was so taken with Eliab’s physical appearance that he thought the man was surely the future king.

Not so much, the Lord said.

“Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart,” God told Samuel (1 Samuel 16:7 NIV).

Eventually God identified the one who was perhaps the least likely of Jesse’s sons as the king to be anointed—David, the youngest, a lowly shepherd.

God’s vision is true vision. Our human vision is not—it’s faulty, and sometimes our vision plays tricks on us. Sometimes it sees falsely, focusing on what we want to see, and sometimes it rejects something because it doesn’t look the way we think it should. Consider the coming of Christ so many years after the days of Samuel and David—few if any suspected the Messiah would come as an infant born to a poor virgin in a manger, raised in what was considered to be the “no worth” town of Nazareth. The people couldn’t see the truth because their vision was faulty.

The seashells on that beach, the skin and bones people who walk the earth… on our own, viewed with faulty human vision, we’re nothing much. We’re just plain, ordinary, everyday parts of the world.

But to God, we’re extraordinary. We’re as stunningly iridescent as that pearly-purplish seashell held between my fingers on that sunshiny summer coastal afternoon.

And make no mistake: It’s God who gives us that beauty.

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