Beauty is as Beauty Believes

Did you know that there are creams that can take twenty years off your face? By just changing your jeans you can look ten pounds thinner. Forty is the new thirty, thirty is the new twenty and being twenty-five is just about all you could ever hope for in life. After all, if we use the magic products and never let the sun’s rays touch our skin and drink sixteen glasses of water a day and work out every day we CAN STAY YOUNG FOREVER!!!!!

What a relief. (I wonder why all those ladies at the YMCA Silver Sneakers classes don’t use those creams. I mean, to be seventy and yet look like a twenty year old! Wow!)

But really, I don’t want to be young forever. Oh, there are days when I look in the mirror and wonder how I didn’t notice time brushing these lines onto my face and lessening the softness of my skin. When did it happen? I look in the mirror every day, but the march of time was silent and gentle and passed by me virtually unnoticed. And I realize completely that I am still very young by modern standards. And yet, while I may wish to have that young skin every once in a while, I never want the other luggage on that trip back in the time machine. To lose the lessons marriage, ministry and motherhood have brought to me in the last ten years would be sad for sure. My children would not enjoy the mildly narcissistic twenty-five year me being completely overwhelmed with the task of caring for them. I’m pretty sure my husband would tire of my emotional breakdowns brought on by immaturity, even if I did look exactly like the girl in our wedding pictures.

So then if beauty is not youth like all those commercials want us to think, then what is it? Recently I was reading the blog of a girl who works with orphans in Africa. She is what our modern society would call beautiful. Her outward beauty pales in comparison to the beautiful choice she has made to care for people so many of us have forgotten. And in the pictures on her blog, she is surrounded by women and children, whose lives have given them so little, and yet their smiles are as big as a child’s on Christmas morning. She has brought joy to them, she has brought love to them, she has brought life to them. That may be the most beautiful thing a person can do in life.

I know that if I can choose to love like that- to create beauty by being a blessing in another person’s life- then mine was worth living. And each day I live I am really getting closer to the most beautiful sight any of us will ever see: the face of the God who loves us in our ugliest moments. Any airbrushed, perfectly edited photograph of the most beautiful person we know will pale in comparison to what we see that day. I hope that when my time to age is done and I stand before Him, He will look at me and tell me He found true beauty in my choices with the life He gave me. Which means I have a lot to do, and I can’t be bothered with worries about wrinkles.