Last week’s fire at the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris captured the world’s attention. No one died in the fire, and most of the structure ended up being saved. But it was still awful to watch as the flames took down the spire and threatened to render the whole thing ash. Why did the live TV imagery affect us like this?

Perhaps Ray Ortlund captured it best on Instagram: “In a throwaway world, we mourn to lose precious things — especially those devoted to the glory of God. All the more reason to build as much beauty as we can, while we can.”

Indeed. For Christians, the visceral global reaction to the Notre Dame fire should remind us of the power of beauty. In a post-Christian, secularizing age, beauty still stops people in their tracks. It points them to things that are harder to find in our disposable, present-tense, this-worldly age: things like continuity over time (in Notre Dame’s case, eight centuries!) and orientation toward God and eternity.

“We mourn that nothing lasts,” writes architect David Greusel. “We want something to last.”

May we be spurred to create beauty in our generation that will break people out of the ephemeral and orient them around the eternal, stirring their hearts to long for the God who—in a world of fire and blood and ash and death—promises to make all things new.