God and the Unnecessary

Lately, I’ve been fascinated by the phrase “unnecessary beauty.” I wrote about beauty that, as far as I can see, is not needed in an article called “Seeing God in Everything:”

Every morning, I make a latte for my husband. Each day, there is a crisscross pattern in the water as it pours from the kettle to the pitcher. Lines come in from each side, cross over each other and form a diamond-shaped pattern --“water diamonds.” It’s beautiful, and so unnecessary! The water could go from kettle to pitcher just as effectively if it fell straight down like a waterfall.

I made a video to try to capture what I mean.

Recently, I read this article in “The Marginalian” newsletter talking about the same concept:

The necessities of survival make our lives livable, but everything that makes them worth living partakes of the art of the unnecessary: beauty (the cave was no warmer or safer for our paintings, and what about the bowerbird?), love (how easily we could propagate our genes without it), music (we may have never milked it from mathematics, and the universe would have cohered just the same). —”How Play Made Us and Keeps Us Human,” by Maria Popova, The Marginalian.

Not just visual beauty, as I wrote about, but many unnecessary things that this writer says “make our lives livable,” which I would say are evidence of God’s love.

Can you think of examples of God's unnecessary beauty?

God loves you!