We are presented with rough stones in life. Can we find anything of beauty in them if we chip away and see what emerges?
A seventeen-foot-tall, 12,000-pound statue of a beautiful man was unveiled in Florence in 1504. I recently discovered that this statue started 40 years earlier as a big misshapen unwieldy chunk of marble, 19 feet high. It was delivered to various sculptors with commissions to make a figure from it and they just could not make anything of it. Eventually it lay in a field for 30 years until Michelangelo was given the commission. He built a shed around it, and rather than working against the irregularities in the stone, he used them to create an elegant beautiful statue. He worked with the poor quality and brittleness of the marble, the veins and pinholes. The final pose came out of the irregular shape of the stone. When a friend of mine recently visited it, its beauty and majesty blew her away.
Michelangelo later said, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” And again: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
I know I have been handed circumstances that look ugly. I want to just push them away. But maybe if I chip away at them, there is beauty to be found under the rough edges and in the imperfections. What about you? Are there any big ugly chunks in your current circumstances? Can you set any good things free from within them? Have you ever been able to do that in the past? That might encourage you to do that now.