Campaign for a Balanced Life

I've undertaken a campaign.  Its not a political one, nor is it military, nor even a campaign for social or economic justice. Each of those may very well have their own time and place and possibly an appropriate demand for my attention, but the campaign that has gripped me especially during these last weeks of the semester here at Handong is a campaign for living a more balance life.

The busy-ness of life, especially in the life of students and professors alike, has been advancing with menacing force over this past month.  The campaign I have undertaken is my small attempt to thwart this advance. And how might you ask am I mounting such a campaign? What tactics and strategies am I employing?  My chief weapn is the camera function on my mobile phone, and my subjects are the flowers of the field.

As I walk about campus each morning, I purposefully search out beauty -- the beauty Jesus taught us to behold when he said, "Consider the lilies."  When I find beauty, I photograph it.  And then as I go about my day, I display the photo I have most recently taken on my mobile's wallpaper and simply ask the student or professor I have encountered along the way whether they know where on campus this object of beauty may be seen, and when seen considered. 

If they know, they have already joined the ranks of my campaign.  If they're willing to search it out, they are well on their way.  If, though, they do not know nor care to discover, then they have been overcome by our common enemy -- the tyrany of the urgent.  I seek to persuade them that a life balanced with the pursuit and appreciation of beauty might actually enhance their performance of those duties that they seem so burdened to fulfill.  It might just help to lift that burden that has so captured their attention that all around them seems a haze or what's worst, a grayness.

Here are a few of my recent photo's of the flowers that have caught the gaze of eyes that have been gracious opened by the belief that one thing is necessary and when we choose it, we will have chosen the better part of life -- a more balanced life.

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.