Beauty meets Purpose

I stood in absolute awe of scenes like this one last Friday. Glacier National Park is beyond words. Beauty is the closest word we have.

Before I saw this, while driving up from Kalispell, I figured out that mountains have a purpose. They store up frozen water, which upon melting, gradually releases the water to the lower regions where people live. Mountains like these continue to store the water well into June. Lakes like these provide additional storage for the rest of the summer. God provides year-round water to the inhabitants of the earth via mountain storage.

Usually, I just take views like this one at face value -- I consider their obvious beauty. Yet I had already been thinking about purpose before I saw this. So now I'm blown away that with God, beauty and purpose are often intertwined. I can think of many other analogies where something useful in the natural world is breathtakingly beautiful.