It’s easy to not notice it. We move through our daily lives going from one task to the next, fulfilling our deadlines and commitments, checking the boxes at every turn. At our fingertips, we have an endless feed of news and updates, petitions and opinions. We scroll through the snapshots of other peoples’ lives, taking in their adventures, reading the stories other people wrote. With our eyes fixed on our little screens, our heads down as we walk, we are closed to the beauty all around us.

Dictionary.com defines beauty as “The quality present in a thing or person that gives intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the mind, whether arising from sensory manifestations (as shape, color, sound, etc.), a meaningful design or pattern, or something else (as a personality in which high spiritual qualities are manifest).”

It’s easy to appreciate beautiful things, things of joy and inspiration, when we are on a road trip, a vacation, an exotic adventure. Holidays are steeped in sentimentality, and we’re often more aware of the things that bring us joy. But that bus ride home in the dark after a 10-hour work day under fluorescent lights—not so much. And the days where emotions and worries crowd out every thought—they leave little room for observation or appreciation of anything outside of ourselves and our immediate concerns.

So this site—this is my challenge to myself: to acknowledge one thing of beauty every day I am alive.

There’s room for reflection of moments captured from the past, but the challenge is to remember to be open, to be present, to look up and out and around and see the beauty in the way the sunlight breaks through the clouds, or in the compassion in a man feeding squirrels, or in the smile of the woman handing out papers at the train station.

There are an infinite number of reasons to doubt that this world is a beautiful place. And there are an infinite number of reasons to believe that it is. If I believe that God is mysterious and good, then I need only to be open and intentional every day to see His beauty reflected in the world around me.