If You Find Her - Artists, Beauty Within

I’m home again. Sick and coughing but home. And today, I get to play a concert in my own backyard. My backyard consists of the entire coast beaches of north county San Diego, and today at 5, we’ll be playing the Spirit West Coast festival in Del Mar. My backyard is bigger than your backyard.

“Being” a creative “being”

Last night we played our first concert with a guitarist Sean Cimino (come see him with us today in San Diego and tomorrow in Santa Ana). He’s really got some great tones and some serious finesse to his style. I always find it fascinating when a guitar player really puts HIMSELF into his guitar. Its more than notes, more than rifs, more than tones. Rather, it is a reflection of a creative being inside; something ebbing, throbbing, pulsing inside…life.


When I was in England to witness my new baby Nephew being born, I had some great opportunities to feel a moving life-form inside the womb. It was quite surreal actually. There was a conflict in my brain as I tried to comprehend what was happening. There was this totally stretched out belly, tight and ready to explode. With my hands on the surface, I felt these strange movements, parts inside, something mysterious brewing. My brain tried to wrap around the truth that this was no alien. It is a human being, a person, a “someone” with a personality, a destiny, a life ahead of him sitting in there comfortable and patient, existing in the world but behind some layers of skin.

I see artists this way. Like Sean is a creative musician, my wife is an artist as well. She sketches and paints in ways that bring my attention to a deep and complex nature inside of her. When I see her art, the impact is so strong in fact, that it really allures me. Her art is a statement that something beneath the layers of her own skin (beautiful in itself) is a being that sees and knows beauty in a way that makes beauty her own…she becomes it. This kind of beauty is far beyond the Hollywood plastic faces we are offered scattered across the glossy magazine racks. This kind of beauty is treasure beneath the surface (ok, it doesn’t hurt when the surface is quite pleasing too).

If You Find Her

This kind of beauty is beneath the surface of all of us. The culture we have created does little to beckon that beauty to come out. The song I wrote, “If you find her” is about pursuing the beauty within the girl who has become my wife:

She won’t falter easy
She’ll be careful, she’ll be coy
But still she paints her heart
Among the musings of a boy
If you find her,
Tell her that I love her
If she hears you
Ask her heart to come
At the break of morning
The day awaits her when she sleeps
Deep inside her dreams is all
Beauty that she keeps

Pursue and be pursued. There is beauty inside of us because there is God inside of us. A musician like Sean has found a way of expressing that. My wife has found a way of expressing that. Even still they are learning and shaping that expression. What makes it beautiful is that it is purely them. Honest, pure, untainted with the world’s expectations of what SHOULD be played on a guitar or what SHOULD be painted on a canvas. Their creative beauty has been pursued and drawn out over time, like the infant inside waiting to be born.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons…” (Rom. 8:22)

(Original Artwork by Joseph Kraft)