Bringing Beauty to the Broken Places

We were all meant to experience God's presence with our eyes. In the beginning, God placed us in a garden of Eden - doubtless the most beautiful place ever to exist. Even now, He created the natural world around us with unfathomable intricacy - from the perfect pattern in the center of a sunflower to the immense, spiraling arms of galaxies we could never reach in a million years. The visual world is silently screaming God's presence - His love, His creativity, His majesty. We were created to experience it daily.

But many of us don't. Especially in at-risk communities, the last thing they're surrounded by is beauty. Often they live their lives surrounded by oppressive, graffiti-coated brick walls and pothole-littered concrete. Withered blades of grass can hardly peep through the cracks. It is a far, far cry from the majestic beauty mankind was meant to exist in.

We are soul-filled beings. Our five senses are directly connected to our spirits. What we hear, taste, touch, smell, and - yes - see, affect our spiritual health on a fundamental and often unrealized level.

Take a look at the two images below, and let yourself experience this reality first-hand for a moment:

In the photo to the left, you are facing a dirty brick wall coated in layers of black soot and spray-painted symbols. In this image, you are glimpsing the visual reality that surrounds an estimated shocking 45 million people in the United States alone.

In the image to the right, you are suddenly transported above the earth's atmosphere, staring into the expanse of space as the sun rises against the backdrop of a billion stars. This visual reality is silently occurring overhead every day, and yet it is completely and utterly removed and absent from the former photo.

Both of these photos depict someone's interpretation of 'art', and yet one transports the human spirit into the awesome presence of God, while the other drags it down into despair and hopelessness. How is this possible?

Because one visual reality was intended for our souls, and one was not.

So what do we do about it? No, we cannot disassemble the surroundings of 45 million people in the USA and miraculously teleport them into the open air under the stars. But we can bring the stars to them.

The stark visual contrast you just glimpsed on your screen is why Majesty Project exists. Our mission is to step into the communities in the first photo and donate the artwork in the second photo. We cannot clean up every street, or scrub off all the graffiti, or tear down the towering walls and let them see the presence of God. But together, we can bring the presence of God to them through art, right where they are - bringing beauty to broken places.

And little by little by little, we can surround them with the hope their souls desperately need through the visual reality they were created for.

"The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone." - Isaiah 9:2