The Beauty In Our Pain

“The pain passes, but the beauty remains”—Renoir

Dorothea Lange’s, The Migrant Worker is considered a masterpiece in photography. There is something about the photo that always seems to astonish. Its subject matter shows a mother’s distress, however, concurrently interprets beauty and elegance. How do you compose grief with delight in one perspective?

Pain in the day-to-day seems to outweigh us. So much pain and suffering, and it’s so unclear as to its relevance in life. Why are we meant to live with so much unrest. Perhaps similar to this beautiful black and white photograph you can begin to look deeper into the shapes that weave our lives.

It’s always difficult to remember while looking at a photograph, television, or even computer screen, that you’re really looking at an immeasurable amount of small dots. Tiny dots of different color that make up the larger picture from a distant view. Astonishing that a perfect composition of black and white dots printed on paper, or shown on a computer screen somehow can translate into meaning. Dots seeming to dance in a beautiful work of art, creating despair, delight or even both.

In so many ways, these dots can resemble the joy and pain in life. Sometimes life is filled with the blessed dots of blissful white, while other seasons are filled with hopeless, unimaginable dots of never-ending black. Frequently the light is even highlighted and contrasted by the depth of the black darkness that seems to surrender to the light. In a unique way the darkness seems to actually craft and shape the light. Giving the light shadow and outlines, while the light directs the eyes, almost persuading them to move from here to there.

As you step back, look outside yourself, and scan the big picture, you can possibly begin to see the story that is forming. The real story, with all its white and black combined, might actually be making an exquisite piece of art. Messy and rough as it’s highlighted and in close range, beautiful and elegant at its proper viewable position.

Are you able to see the beauty in the pain?