A Necklace of Sunbeams

As anyone who knows me intimately can tell you, I have a tendency to stop suddenly when walking to look at something that has caught my interest, and to stand and enjoy it for at least a few seconds, if not longer. For example, I stop to smell the beautiful pink roses that grow on temple hill every time we walk up to the temple. Every Thursday. EVERY time. Fortunately, I happen to have kind and tolerant temple buddies who permit my slight exentricities without complaint.

I did this the other day - this stopping and enjoying, not smelling roses - and ended up seeing something I wish to share with you. I was walking up to campus to go to class when I simply halted, surely startling everyone behind and around me, all of whom were trying to be punctual and hurry along their way. I honestly didn't pay them a second thought, so awestruck was I by the evergreen bushes.

Not the bushes exactly - but what was on them. Strung across the needled limbs were several swaths of spiderwebs, and each strand of each web was adorned with dozens of drops of fresh morning dew, all glittering in the newly-risen sun. I've never seen diamonds so flawless or pearls so bright as were those little dew drops. I stood and gazed for some time, an image materializing in my mind of a richly robed Queen Titania dancing in a moonlit forest, a necklace of fine spiderweb and sunbeams captured inside tiny dewdrops draped about her neck.

"Consider the lilies of the field. They toil not, niether do they spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."

The Savior said those words to His disciples, reminding them that the Lord would provide for them. I've always loved this verse of scripture, because it really is true - humans simply are inferior when it comes to beautiful rainment. All our toiling and spinning and refining and dying and styling and perfecting won't amount to anything nearly so beautiful as Nature and God can create. I could appear to the world wearing all the silks of the orient and all the perfumes of Arabia and all the jewels in Christendom - and still I would not be arrayed with such beauty and perfection as can be found in a single sunset or blushing rose.

I don't think I should like all the silks and jewels anyway. No, I would much rather be seen with a freshness of life, and a bloom of youth, and a blush of health - the beauties Nature has given me.

And perhaps, someday, with a necklace of sunbeams.