The Good, the Bad, and the Pretty

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the relationship between aesthetics and morality. Do our feelings of what’s pretty and what’s ugly have any connection to what’s right and wrong? I think there’s a connection and I want to show you what I’ve found. Let me explain. 

It all started with a simple question: do we think good things are pretty? Do we like songs about good stuff? Do we think movies about good things are pretty? When I turn on the radio, the answer to that feels like a big, fat “no.” But I see a bunch of movies that make me think that the answer might be “yes.” After all, isn’t that why superhero movies work–because we like seeing someone do good, even when it might not be fun? Don’t we also like songs about being good people and making the world a better place? Seems like we’re a mixed bag. The radio is full of evil, our movies get messy, but we also love seeing someone do the right thing. Are we just really confused about what we like, or is something deeper going on?I think it’s the second one. The reason things go from good to bad is because we tend to only feel strongly about one thing at a time. Yes, we can feel conflicted, but eventually we all wind up having a favorite good thing. We might like order and justice, or mercy and compassion. Whatever good things we wind up liking, we slowly start liking them more and more as time passes. And this is where things get messy. 

After I realized that good things can be pretty, I started asking myself whether or not all good things were pretty all the time. I wanted to know if I was saying things were good because they were pretty, and things were bad because they were ugly. If I got an ick about a decision, was it always wrong? And if I thought a decision was pretty, does that make it right? And, more interestingly, could there be a time when an icky decision was actually the right one? 

If we never feel icky about doing the right thing, then our feelings about pretty and ugly are what good and bad are all about. There are a lot of weird places we can go with that, but I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole right now. What I finally decided was that pretty and ugly aren’t perfect guides to right and wrong. I think it’s because we get obsessed with something good, to the point where we are willing to ignore another good to get it. We have compassion for someone until we let them do whatever they want, even if that means stealing from someone. On the other side, we get so obsessed with justice that we punish the guy that was just stealing to feed his family. It’s a balancing act and we can easily fall off into bad stuff because we like a good thing too much. 

Where do we go from here, though? How do we do better? Well, we need something deeper than those feelings to guide us. I think this is where God comes in. I don’t think it’s as cheesy and simple as following a simple verse though. Red flag number one is still confidence for me. If you don’t feel at least a little uncomfortable with where God is taking you, then you aren’t being stretched and tested, so you aren’t growing. 

I guess the question, then, is how does God come in. Good one! The easy one is to say that we should follow the Bible. If the Bible says that kissing horses is weird and you think it’s fine, then you shouldn’t go do it anyway. This can be tough because deep down, we all think we’re right. We think we know right and wrong so well that we can be in charge. But there’s also something real to that feeling of pushing back against the Bible. We can sometimes misread it. When the old testament says don’t put markings on yourself, it isn’t talking about tattoos, but evil cult stuff. There are still good reasons not to get tattoos, but we can misuse the good book for our shenanigans. 

But when you come to a big decision that seems like it’s going against what the bible is saying, it’s important to react like a real person. Tell God you’re annoyed, tell Him you don’t get it. Trusting God and following is good, but if you don’t learn to want anything new, you won’t grow. It’s as important to follow in the trust of what God might want as it is to want the same things. Both are key to an excellent life. 

That leads into the whole “hearing from God” thing. I have always seen myself as bad at this kind of thing. I don’t feel comfortable trying to hear a God-voice or dreaming a God-dream. It always feels weird to me. But you can’t get every good decision out of the Bible as just a book, so God does kinda need to be involved in a more active way. Being God means knowing everything though, so I’m confident that He knows what you are and aren’t good at. I say if you’re willing to let Him make changes, He’ll find a way to move you in the right direction. The how changes from person to person. You just have to send that prayer up to get the ball rolling. 

The places He may send you may seem odd and maybe even a little annoying, though. But could I say that it could actually feel wrong? It reminds me of this question that has been in the back of my mind for years: would God call me to go against my own conscience? It’s a tricky one, for sure. I definitely have questions that I ask of God; things I don’t get. But now I have started asking myself: what if I just don’t see the whole picture? What if I’m so obsessed with blue skies that I can’t appreciate rain? That’s what seems most likely to me. 

It’s still important to know that there’s a difference between not being sure that God said something, and not wanting to do it. I think Gideon knew this. He was really sheepish for a while and wanted to test God to make sure that he was on the right track. And you know what God did? He let him! But when it was showtime, Gideon really took the ball and ran with it! 

I think that’s why it’s important to ask God those questions. Did you really hear Him right? Does that Bible verse really say what you think it said? What if you have a gut feeling about something? Do you run with it? Maybe you’ve got the right idea, maybe there’s more of the picture that you don’t see. Sometimes we’re attached to the right things, sometimes we aren’t. At the end of the day, we should be willing to go against those things, but not to let them go forever. Some day, we will be attached to the right things. Some days, the right thing is the thing we want to do. 

Until Next Time

May Peace be your Guide.