Fleeting days stack up into weeks that turn into months, and they are busy running downhill into a year that is bent on winning its own race. But before time pushes us through the finishing line, we must stop and think. Stop and think about our purpose for the here and now, and for the rest of 2012. How and where do we turn off, and how do we stay on course? Because every new generation's onslaught on its heritage and on its culture — whether buildings, parks, streets or values — is not written on paper, but in the care or in the neglect of those things. In other words: how safe or how unsafe are the foundations on which it all rests.

If the unseen is more real than the seen, then the value we attach to the things around us is more important than the things themselves, and the creating of the thing carries more meaning than the thing itself. And then an individual's or a community's outlook on life crystallises more visibly in its way of doing than in what it does. Do we plant and sow to fill up empty spaces, or do we plant and sow to make a host of angels rejoice because a field, or a pavement, has come to conversion? We are not measured for no reason by the measure with which we measure. The disposition with which we feed and clothe others, or give a new dignity to a garden, will bring a harvest back to us in the same measure — lavishly or stingily doled out.

God's will for us as a community begins with the creation commission of Genesis 1 — to have dominion and to look after. Isaiah echoes it when he calls on us to rebuild the old ruins and to raise up the foundations of former generations, so that we may be called: Rebuilders of broken walls, Restorers of paths that make places habitable again (Isaiah 58:12).

The law of entropy, which decrees that everything eventually unwinds and that gradual decay is the lot of all matter, is the constant challenge every new generation inherits and is trumped by. Therefore every new generation must spread its time, its money and its energy evenly, so that new things are not only raised up, but so that heritage is looked after and cared for. It is the surest commission within the will of the Father. A fixed fact that is true in heaven and that struggles and labours to be made true on earth. It is more than a creation commission; it is a Kingdom commission. A municipal commission. A heavenly mandate. A universal task. The ultimate calling — establish beauty. Establish valuable beauty and look after it. A town that does not eternally keep watch over the integrity of its spiritual capital will make reckless decisions and will appoint the wrong overseers; until the taste in our eyes, over time, grows numb and we lose our frame of reference for beauty.

Time erases our footprints. But time cannot erase beauty. Real beauty begins in the inner room. It is something that happens to you — that gives value to everything you say and do. Beauty is something with which our senses are quenched and nourished. A message from your eyes that strains in every direction, overwhelmed with joy, to deposit that joy into lovely little places.

Beauty that has walked through your eyes you never forget.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer