“The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe…We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice” (John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972, p. 8). 

“We live in a broken world, and that can be overwhelming at times. But the gospel reminds us that beauty can still be found in the most unlikely places, if we only have the eyes to see it. Beauty matters, and each and every one of us is called to be an agent of beauty…” (Winfield Bevins, How Beauty Will Save the World, 2025, p. 20).

I am overwhelmed. I haven’t just felt tired–I’ve felt depleted and spiritually threadbare. I feel like my ability to hope has become fragile. I still care deeply, and I still try to pay attention. But somewhere along the way, I lost some of my tenacity.

And I want it back.

The strange thing is that even in the middle of all this heaviness, I still believe in beauty. I still believe goodness exists. Last month I wrote these words:

“The idea that beauty will save us suggests something deeper: that beauty has power. The beauty that has the ability to save us and change us is not superficial beauty, not perfection, but the kind that reveals truth, evokes compassion, and draws us out of ourselves.”

I still believe that. Deeply.

I believe beauty matters because beauty reminds us we are more than consumers of bad news and participants in outrage cycles. Beauty interrupts despair. It softens us when cynicism threatens to calcify the heart. Beauty calls us back to wonder, back to tenderness, back to one another.

And yet believing in beauty does not magically erase overwhelm. Both things can exist at the same time. I can stand in awe of an early summer sky streaked pink and purple while also carrying grief over the state of the world. I can laugh with friends over dinner and still feel the low-grade hum of anxiety beneath the surface. I can believe in goodness while struggling to hold onto hope, to beauty, to truth.

This is the tension I am living in right now.

The other evening, Joel—my Artist spouse—and I went for a walk so I could verbally process the events of the day. By “verbally process,” I mean I unleashed an avalanche of thoughts, fears, frustrations, and questions while he listened. We talked about politics and parenting and exhaustion and overwhelm and beauty and creativity and what it means to remain human in a culture that increasingly feels designed to strip us of our humanity.

At some point, our conversation circled back to ideas from the talk he gave at the Creative Arts Collective Summit at Belmont University in April. Later that night, I returned to my notes from his talk because something in them felt important—necessary, even.

His talk went something like this:

*Author’s Note: The following is a major paraphrase done from notes taken during the talk, in addition to reading the outline he “wrote” for the talk.

In the beginning, God created. 

In the beginning, God created humans in God’s own (creative) image. 

God is relational. 

Thus, we are meant to be creative with and for others. 

He commented, “Why should we think about this? [Why should we consider that] creating is an inherent part of being? Because we live in a culture that often sees scarcity instead of fullness–that maintains the status quo to the point of being stagnant when a life of flourishing is available. [We live in a] culture that runs on consuming instead of being generative.”

And then came the line I cannot stop thinking about: “[We live in] a reactive culture, instead of a creative one. But if we rearrange one letter, we move from REACTIVE to CREATIVE.”

I have been carrying that sentence around like a mantra repeated throughout the day as a type of prayer. I know how reactive I have become lately. I know how much of my energy has been spent responding to chaos instead of cultivating life. I know I’ve lost my tenacity and am reacting instead of creating. I’m consuming instead of generating. I’m surviving instead of flourishing.

And maybe that is part of what overwhelm steals from us. It doesn’t just steal our peace, but our imagination. It steals our ability to envision something beyond the immediate crisis, our capacity to make beauty anyway. Overwhelm steals our ability to nurture community anyway, to keep creating anyway.

Beauty and creativity, then, are resistance.

To create is to insist that destruction will not have the final word.

And maybe this is where I begin to recover my tenacity—not by pretending overwhelm doesn’t exist, but by refusing to let it be the only thing that shapes me. Maybe tenacity looks less like relentless striving and more like faithful creating, even when I’m too tired to even think of making something. 

Maybe tenacity is continuing to seek beauty when cynicism (or skepticism) feels easier. Maybe tenacity is protecting tenderness in a culture that rewards cruelty. Maybe it looks like choosing wonder over numbness, curiosity over fear, community over isolation. Maybe it looks like making things that nourish life instead of merely reacting to things that diminish it. 

I don’t want to spend my life trapped in reaction mode. I don’t want my spirit formed entirely by outrage and anxiety and doomscrolling. I want to see –to choose to see–beauty. I want to notice goodness without feeling naïve for doing so. I want to cultivate a life that is expansive and generative.

I want to live a flourishing, creative life.

I want to seek—and see—beauty, truth, and goodness. This is still the longing of my heart.

I’m hoping that with enough practice, with enough intention, I’ll be able to do what Winfield Bevins suggests when he writes, “…the ideal outcome of an encounter with beauty…is that one will want to become a beautiful human being, like Christ himself…The more beauty we take in, the more we find ourselves loving, or, at least wanting to want to love, the things Christ himself loves, seeing, as he sees the world around us as worthy of all beauty” (p. 16).