Have you ever seen the Mona Lisa? Like the real one? 

When I was 19, I got the incredible opportunity to study abroad in London. From there I was able to travel all over parts of Europe and see and experience life in a whole new way. I could write a whole book about what I learned about the world, people, faith and myself that semester. There were a lot of surprises, and one of them was in Paris at the Louvre, viewing the Mona Lisa. 

Spoiler alert: She’s tiny! She’s roped off and there are hundreds of people trying to see her and you have to fight your way through and stand on your tippy toes just to get a glance because she is TINY. Like, 8×10 or something…….tiny. 

When you see pictures of the Mona Lisa you are left with this bigger than life image, and I just assumed the painting was bigger than life too. We were all dumbfounded. Don’t get me wrong, it was still amazing to see this famous painting (kind of) up close and personal, but I had built the idea up in my head so much that there was a part of the experience that was underwhelming as well.

Same with Stonehenge. I was SO excited to see Stonehenge! I fell asleep on the tour bus and woke up to the tour guide saying, “If you’ll look out your left window, you will see Stonehenge.” I was so confused.

Stonehenge is just hanging out there in the middle of some highways! I remember thinking, “Wow, people probably drive by this on their way to work every day. That’s weird.”

Again, I had this image of a foggy druid world built up in my head that would involve hiking to a remote area to see these huge rocks of Stonehenge. But life went on I guess, and what was once filled with so much awe and mystery, in some ways became common place. 

At the same time, there were some things during that semester that I would have dismissed as insignificant that ended having a lasting impact on my life.

Athens, Greece was another great place I got to visit that semester. We visited Mars Hill, read the Sermon on the Mount and out of nowhere someone had started playing Amazing Grace on the bagpipes. As a believer, it was a surreal experience to be in one of the places I’ve spent my whole life reading about in the Bible. To walk where Paul walked. We left out on a train that day and my friend Emily and I sat across from a man and his son on the train and we were just grateful to find some space together. The little boy was trying to take a nap on the seats and the father was constantly tucking and re-tucking his jacket around the boy to make sure he didn’t fall or get cold. Emily and I remarked how sweet the man was. Turns out he spoke english and this allowed us to strike up a conversation. He and his son were from Afghanistan and were refugees in Greece. His wife and family had been killed by the Taliban. 

This was 2003, just two years after the attacks on the twin towers in New York and there was still a lot of fear, a lot of unknowns and a lot of distrust when it came to muslims and refugees from the middle east. The man told us how he longed to go to America, how he longed for a life of freedom for his son. He wanted our help to get him there and we had no idea if there was anything we could do.

Eventually, the boy woke up hungry and the father took him to find the snack cart. When they came back, he had bought us a bag of potato chips as well.

Y’all. It’s been literally twenty years since that happened and I am crying as I type these words. I still have that bag of potato chips. I don’t even like potato chips! But that man, who had nothing, bought them for us, two people who had everything, just because he wanted to be kind. The world was telling us to hate each other at the time, but we both chose to love instead. 

We exchanged contact info and kept in touch for a while. But they moved to a different camp, and Emily and I both moved multiple times and have long ago lost touch. I do wonder what happened to them. Did they find home? Did they find peace? Did they ever make it to America? Are they disappointed with what they found because it doesn’t match up with the grand idea they had in their head? 

What do we do when the promise doesn’t match up to the reality? What do we hold to when what we have known to be great turns out to be mostly hype? 

I think we open our eyes to the beauty before us. We remember that God often works in the simple, in the ordinary. Jesus was no Jim Caviezel or Jonathan Roumie, he was unremarkable from the outside. Honestly, if the Mona Lisa wasn’t THE Mona Lisa, I would have walked right by it in the Louvre and moved on to the art that really captured my attention. True love and true connection and true gasp worthy, awe struck, life changing moments come out of nowhere sometimes, and not in the ways we expect them too. 

I turned 40 this year, and I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting over my life. When I really think about it, I have lived one freaking incredible life so far. I’ve had beautiful experiences, I’ve made life long friends, I’ve learned and studied and grown, I’ve seen a chunk of the world and I’ve met people from all over. I’ve had cool jobs and fallen in love. There have been some pivotal moments that though small in retrospect, drastically changed the trajectory of my life. Those potato chips are one of them. Meeting that man from Afghanistan in the wake of all that was going on at the time, opened my eyes to people in a way I couldn’t have seen otherwise. I started asking myself a lot of questions about faith, about people, about myself. I look back and think that was where my ability to see people’s hearts through their outside appearance and behavior really began to be nourished and grown. I didn’t know I was going to grow up to be a therapist then, but it was setting the stage for me to be good at what God has called me to do. 

If you are looking for a spark in your life, an ignition into something different or just something to keep you going and offer a bit of hope, I have learned we should look to the simple. Don’t wait for the magnificent, go find the magnificent in the ordinary. 

Maybe the best thing I’ve learned in my 40.75 years is that beauty is literally everywhere, in everything. Hard and ugly are also everywhere, but if your eyes are open, and you are connected to your own beauty, you can see it in other things when it’s time. 

Ah, there we have it, the place my heart was leading when I started writing. You are beautiful. I am beautiful. We all have beauty. That is true on our magnificent days when the hair falls just right and the words come out well. And it is also true on the days we can’t get out of bed, and our hair sticks to our face from drool and we can’t find the energy to move it. 

Life is lived and life is moved in all the moments, grand or small. I was with that man and his little boy for just a few hours, literally a blip, and it set my life slowly turning in a new direction. I would not be who I am today without meeting them. I can only pray I can pay that forward somewhere.