Beauty

Today I am having a really good hair day!  Does that mean that today I qualify as beautiful? Or just my hair? What about tomorrow when I want to sleep in and not put the extra effort into fixing it? Will I not be beautiful anymore? Is beauty something that you can attain and then lose?

There are so many facets to beauty: beauty in nature, beauty in poetry, the Beautiful People of Hollywood, real beauty, fake beauty, inner beauty, and outer beauty. But the one I am most drawn to is the beauty of other people. When I was in eighth grade, we went on a retreat for one Saturday all day, and a prayer we learned on that retreat was, "God, help me to see myself through Your eyes, so I can see how wonderful and beautiful I really am."  I prayed that prayer from eighth grade and it did great things for how I saw myself on the outside, so I tweaked it a little, to see if maybe it could help how I was on the inside. I started praying, "God, help me to see other people through Your eyes, too, so I can see their wonder and beauty."  I think that the most influential thing that this prayer showed me was that beauty and worth are so connected, which society has already shown us: the prettiest people get the most attention and stuff.  I think, though, it is completely backwards. What it should be is: the worth that God has created within you is manifested in the beauty of the heart He created for you.  And the most incredible part of this is that, unlike Hollywood "beauty", this worth does not have to be earned, coated on, or achieved: we are all born with it!  Being created in God's image and likeness has filled us with worth, simply pouring over the depths of our souls, and we are all so beautiful because of it.

God's Love and worth are true, but that does not always mean that our human minds can understand it, and because of the beauty before worth mentality, I find that a lot of people (myself included) see themselves as unworthy of things like God's Love or respect from others.  At the very least, we end up viewing beauty on a day-to-day, outfit-to-outfit, mood-to-mood, or sin-to-sin basis.  I have been hoping and praying for words to share with people to tell them, and to reassure myself, that this simply is not true. God's Love and our worth in His eyes and truth are not fleeting, and today my mom sent me a music video that I think sums it up absolutely perfectly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF5CjtrIl_c&feature=related