What is beauty?

Once when I was about six I was going shopping with my dad and the girl behind the counter, when she wasn’t serving anyone, was writing out on a piece of paper and mumbling affirmations: “I am beautiful. I am strong. I can do this.”

There are nine year old girls who will do this. They have not formed an identity and they are searching for it. They don’t believe they are beautiful, so they try to confirm it without any real ground, without reason. Simply repeating, “I am beautiful,” doesn’t make them feel any better because they feel they need someone else to affirm it. They need their friends to tell it to them. They need their crush to say it out loud to them.

They are searching for the wrong kind of beauty. They have lost their sense of true beauty because the media, the magazines and articles that they read, tell them what beauty means. Beauty, according to the world, is having the perfect body. Big eyes and soft skin, a gap between your thighs (because otherwise you’ll be labelled as “fat”), a big butt and the skinniest little waist. Beauty comes in trendy Instagram photographs with pretty filters on them, in powder compacts and lipstick tubes. Beauty is having boys ask you out; if they don’t then you’ll probably have to start on a stricter diet and work out more often ... and then again, maybe you don’t have what it takes, maybe you never will, maybe if you aren’t born the perfect image of beauty you will never achieve it.

I think I was a fairly nice looking little girl, when I was perhaps seven or so. When I got to be around ten I had a very sensitive spirit and could fairly easily be reduced to tears, and I also became a little more chubby. I know, I know, that if I had gone to school I would have started to obsess over my weight and my looks. I would have been called fat. Apparently these days natural baby fat, ordinary weight gain, can label you as “obese.” Thank God for homeschooling! I was taught femininity and gently prepared for the world outside.

We forget about the beauty within. I can’t look in the mirror and say in all honesty that I have a beautiful face, a beautiful body, like the models on magazine covers, because I know it isn’t true. I don’t have that kind of beauty at all and I never will. But I have noticed that those same models are devoid of what could make them truly beautiful; they never smile, they look for the most part very unhappy, and it’s likely they don’t believe in their own hearts that they are beautiful. They probably don’t know what love is.

God does not create anything ugly. Our souls are beautiful. So very, very beautiful! Why should we care what the world thinks of us, what our girl friends gossip over behind our backs, whether this boy or that boy might just notice us if we looked a little different ... if we were skinnier or our eyes were blue ... when God himself, the One who created us (and Who, by the way, created our girl friends and this boy and that boy), Who loves us as He made us? We were made for a reason. We are loved and wanted. Did Mary, did Elizabeth or any of the women who followed God look like fashion models or worry what anyone was thinking of them? No, and yet they were beautiful. They were beautiful because they possessed beauty, not just pretty faces and admirers.

If we look to God we will find that beauty, ageless and lovely. We must run after Him to find what our hearts truly desire.