My Love/Hate Relationship With Beauty

"I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are Your works, and that my soul knows very well." Psalm 139:14

"Look closely at one of the lies our society tries to sell. "You must be physically perfect in order to be accepted, in order to feel truly beautiful." Believing you must have a certain look, a toned body, a certain color of skin, commercial worthy hair, or perfect straight teeth in order to be beautiful is such a lie." -Kimberly Powers

My daughter is eight and she's starting to say things like, " I wish my hair was yellow", or" I wish I had blue eyes like my brother." Like a good, Christian mom, I always say something like," God made you just the way He wanted to, and He doesn't make any mistakes, right?" or, "Isn't it wonderful that God made people in all different shapes, sizes and colors. Imagine how boring it would be if we all looked exactly the same." I want her to be really comfortable with the way she looks. God planned for her to have brown hair and brown eyes. To me she is a work of art! I'm sure a lot of you say similar things to your daughters, but then what do we do? We look in the mirror at ourselves and make mental notes about all the physical things we wish we could change about our own appearance. We may day dream about what is would be like to get "some work done" and get rid off all these things that bother us so much. I wonder what God thinks when we have these thoughts. He planned how He was going to create us from the beginning of time. He told us that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and we know God doesn't make mistakes, right? And then He sees us criticizing His beautiful work. The older I get the more I realize this isn't just a problem teen girls have. I assume some women have overcome this. I'm still working on it. Sometimes we worry so much about whether or not someone else thinks we're outwardly beautiful. Maybe we suppress it for the good of our daughters, but it's still there, deep in our hearts.

I've always struggled with the color of my skin. Starting in elementary school, I would have kids come up to me, hold their arm up to mine and say, "Wow! look how dark I am compared to you". I hated it so much. I was thankful I lived in Michigan where the summers were short and not too hot. As a teen I would try to lay out in attempt to get tan, but it only resulted in sunburns. I was teased so much and I thought if I could just get a tan, I would be pretty and they would leave me alone. A week before my wedding, the photographer suggested to me to go tanning so I would look better in my wedding pictures. I would dread summer every year and avoid wearing shorts at all costs. That seemed to work until we moved to South Carolina. I quickly learned 2 things. Summers were very long,and very hot! I had a daughter and I knew I had to deal with this sin in my life. I call it sin because I was ashamed of the way God made me and wished I could look different. Having a poor self image is pride disguised as humility. I didn't want her to see the hypocrisy in my life. For me, wearing pants all summer was not an issue of modesty or high dress standards, it was being embarrassed by the color or my skin. Yes, I actually felt like it was sinful for me to wear pants instead of shorts, because of of my motives. I'm getting better, but it is a struggle every year when the weather starts to get warm. I know some of you struggle with similar things. When I see women who may be a little over weight, or have varicose veins, or scars wearing shorts, I have so much admiration for them, because they are comfortable with the way they look. They are dressed appropriately for the weather and aren't even thinking about it. I want to be like that. I know of a woman in her 60's who still struggles with this. She wears long pants even if it's 100 degrees out because her husband told her she was too white and needed some color in her skin. His comment offended me, because my skin was the same color as hers and I had shorts on. I felt like he was telling me I was ugly. I have a feeling that even the women I see that I think are so beautiful have something they wish they could change too. You can't turn the tv on without hearing about different ways to dress to look younger or some new facial treatment that will take away wrinkles. The truth is we are all going to age and we should focus more on God's idea of beauty.

God should be able to look at us and see a person so consumed with Him that we don't have any time to think about ourselves. Our focus should be on glorifying Him. Some of you are so beautiful on the inside, that that's all I see when I look at you.Don't be fooled into believing that you have to live up to this impossible standard of beauty.

"I will praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are Your works and that my soul knows very well."