Peeling back the layers from me of dedicated mother, doting grandmother, sister, cousin and niece, you will find that underneath all those things there is still a fragment of a girl left deep down inside of me. When I was young I read all the magazines and tried all the make-up tricks trying to look beautiful. As the years passed and the styles changed I kept up pretty good and I still use all the eye make-up, liquid eye-liner and all that I got so fond of back in the sixties, I don’t like lipstick also a throw back to those days, and I can’t lose my “teasing brush” as hard as I might try. Our society is obsessed with our appearance and the way people perceive us has everything to do with how we present ourselves. People get face-lifts, tummy tucks, breast augmentation, Botox in all possible cracks and crevices in our face and neck; diet to lose fat, gain muscle, look younger, or simply to wear a smaller size jeans.
What is all the falderal about? What possible difference does it make in the larger picture of life?
I look at photos of children starving, every bone in their body showing through a layer of skin that has no cushion of fat in it. They are worried about where their next meal will come from not counting calories. I have seen a woman who was so scarred on her face and neck from being burned she was beyond any recognition of her former self, yet when she looked at you with her kind eyes and sweet spirit, her loving attitude so soothing to her loved ones that you forgot her scars and only saw her soul. There have been both women and men that had a pleasant outward appearance and you thought them attractive until they opened their mouth and their sour, self absorbed attitude so prevailed that you no longer saw them as attractive but as the hateful human being they really were. My mother always answered my question of how I looked with, “Pretty is as pretty does!”
1 Samuel 16:7 But GOD told Samuel, “Looks aren’t everything. Don’t be impressed with his looks and stature. I’ve already eliminated him. GOD judges persons differently than humans do. Men and women look at the face GOD looks into the heart.” The forty-nine times in the Bible that “beauty” is referenced, it is most often speaking of the “beauty of holiness“. Psalm 29:2 Give unto the LORD the glory due to His name; Worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness. What I love most is to hear the honest, joyful laugh of a child, or the sudden tears that spring from happy eyes, and I love to be the one that caused that laugh or did something that brought those happy tears. If I can do that I will consider myself beautiful by anyone’s measure. God loves beauty, you can see it when the trees are changing colors, in the graceful Magnolia tree with her giant glossy leaves and soft white flowers, or in the eyes of a baby where you see the eternal God looking back at you.
From Psalm 8, “Oh Lord, my Lord, how excellent is your name in all the earth, what is man that you are mindful of him” I agree!
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