Little girl’s face and colorful sky have power to pierce my heart

By David McElroy · August 8, 2015

A woman I know sent me a few pictures of her young daughter Friday. I hadn’t seen pictures of this little girl for about six or eight months — and I wasn’t prepared for how seeing her would affect me.

This little lady is beautiful. Her mother is beautiful, too, so that’s no surprise, but she’s already getting to the point that she looks more like a beautiful little girl than just a drooling baby. She has some teeth and you can see depth of personality in her toothy little grin. You can see some kind of beauty that transcends physical appearance in an inexplicable way.

Looking at those pictures almost made me cry, because I was overwhelmed with a beauty that pierced my heart and pointed me once again toward the joy of living in this amazing Creation.

Saturday evening at sunset, I was walking in a local park when I realized the sky had suddenly started turning pink and orange and red and gold. I stopped walking and just stood there trying to drink it all in. For about 15 minutes, I felt as though I was watching a Master Painter put on another showing of the world’s longest-running art show. The western sky glowed and changed colors constantly for a few minutes, but even the sky overhead and on other sides was a delicate pink and orange.

A little girl came walking by with her parents and she looked at me as she pointed to the sky.

“It’s pink!” she told me with excitement in her voice.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I asked her and she nodded enthusiastically as they walked past. Her parents never looked and never said a word. (Click here for a bigger image of the sky.)

In both of these cases, I experienced the joy and beauty of this Creation in ways that were so strong they hurt. With both of them, I felt a fullness in my chest around my heart. It felt like love that was going to break through my chest and fill the world.

I was filled with painful pleasure. I felt happy to be alive.

Nature can sometimes be so wonderful that it hurts when I experience it, but I certainly don’t mean it’s something to be avoided. It’s the same kind of painful pleasure — a lump in my throat, a full heart, a warmth all over — that I sometimes get from art, especially music.

That pain which pierces my heart makes me excited to be alive. It feeds my soul. It reminds me why I need connection to God and people and all of Creation. I never feel as alive as I do in such moments.

I realize that not everyone experiences such things in the same way. I have no idea why, but some people seem oblivious to such beauty. They’re the sorts who hastily rush to wherever they’re going instead of stopping to watch the colorful sky or gathering storm clouds or the rustling red and golden leaves waving in the breeze of an autumn day. They’re the sorts who see imaginative children as nuisances to be handed off to others to mold as soon as possible, not living works of art to love and cherish.

I need art. I need nature. I need beauty. Something about them feeds a hunger in me which food can never fill.

I grew up with the vague notion that it was shallow for me to care very much about beauty. I heard people lamenting men and women choosing romantic partners based on their looks instead of their brains, personalities, values, character and hearts. So I spent years trying not to care so much about beauty — especially in women — lest I have to judge myself shallow.

But I think I’m finally mature enough to understand there is something built into me which seeks beauty, whether it’s sunsets or a little girl’s face or well-designed buildings or hills covered with colorful trees or a lovely woman’s face. There is something in me which is programmed to need these keys which perfectly fit a lock that opens my heart.

Life is more fulfilling to me when it’s filled with such experiences. Money and nice houses and nice cars and things other people might admire are great. I enjoy such material things — but they’ll never be worth as much to me as experiences which are there all around me for the taking. For free.

When I experience a loved face or a colorful sunset or a powerful thunderstorm, it’s as though I’m indirectly experiencing the love of God. My heart is overwhelmed. For that moment, I feel connected to all things in pure love — and I experience the joy of being alive.

I need that love. I crave it.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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