You Are Beautiful, Day 3

Beauty can be such a hot button topic in our society. There are so many facets to this one seemingly simple word. Beauty is often times defined by our looks and image. In America, that generally means being youthful, being slim but with a womanly figure, having symmetrical features, and either blonde hair, or being 'exotic' looking. The problem with a definition based on looks is that most of us don't measure up! Society, largely by way of media, makes us think that beauty is something we must constantly seek. We must always want to be thinner, tanner, prettier, have the most fashionable clothes... you know the drill. It's why we are bombarded with ads for plastic surgery, teeth whitening, and with airbrushed models on the covers of magazines. They want us to want that. And guess what? It works!

We also know that there's the smaller group of us who says beauty is defined by what's inside. Beauty is your personality and your character. It's the love you give, the friend that you are to others, and your (hopefully) positive self esteem. But you probably know as well as I do that, even though we know how true beauty should be defined, it's really easy to slip back into that societal way of thinking. Yes, I like who I am as a person (ok, most of the time!) and I do think I am a beautiful person when I think of what I have to offer others, but you better believe that I spend way more time wishing I looked better in a swimsuit, hoping I don't wrinkle too early in life, and wanting prettier features than I do focusing on my inner beauty. So I decided to take it a step further.

You my have seen my post about Catholic guilt that I wrote a few months back. I don't think it's the negative thing that people make it out to be, and actually wish it had a new term, because 'guilt' has a bad connotation. But I've noticed that when I want to make a change in life, if I can tie the change to something related to my faith, I am so much more likely to follow through and really buy into it. It's the reason why I can give up sweets for Lent and not cheat for all 40 days, but I can give up sweets to improve my health other times of the year and I generally cheat before lunch time. I'm usually more successful in doing something for God than for myself. So I thought, "how can I tie beauty into my faith?" My thought is that if I see beauty the way God sees beauty, I will be less likely to feel like I'm not beautiful!

So I turned to the bible, which has quite a lot to say about beauty, actually, and two things in particular really stood out to me. The first was from Song of Solomon 4:7, "You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you." Now I know this is a lover speaking, but there is no better lover than God, so the first thing that came to my mind is that this quote must be exactly how God sees you and I! And if he sees us that way, how can we dare to think differently? Well we do, because we are humans and we are flawed. But what I propose is thinking about this verse when you are being particularly hard on yourself, or wishing you had her legs or her waist or her fashion sense. If we can get ourselves out of that pity party and remember how God sees us, and really, how the people who love us see us, we'll remember that nothing else matters.

This led me into the next verse, from Genesis 1:26, "Then God said 'And let us make man in our image...." You know why God sees us as beautiful and without flaw? Because we are made in His image. Have you ever stopped to think what that means? I never really thought about it until someone brought it up at our engagement retreat. God made us in His image. If I point out all the things about my image that are 'wrong', am I not sort of saying that there is something wrong with God? And that there is something wrong with how He made me? Going to scripture, and leaving behind media and society, is one of the best ways I have found to embrace my beauty. I may not be 'typically beautiful', but I am beautiful because I was made by a God who loves me.

Stacy is a newlywed who blogs at http://catholicandcrunchy.blogspot.com 

about married life, PCOS, NFP, frugality, and being crunchy!