When You Fear Not Being Beautiful

“But I just don’t think I am beautiful”, Egyptian brown eyes look down at the comforter, wrapping her as winter taunts.

“Why?”…”But you are beautiful.”  I don’t even wait for an answer. Anger.  Frustration.  Boils in me.  I try to hold them down.

I knew this day would come.

“You are sooo beautiful sweetie”.  This mothers-heart aches to show her what I see.  “Beautiful. Chosen. Loved.  Blessed.”

Something was brewing.  I could feel it for days.  Instead I let distractions and business control my sensitivity to this warning in the eyes of my little one needing explanations….An explanation for why she looks different. 

All this talk of “She is beautiful”…”She is not”, with my older daughter over facebook.  I should have known it could have been detrimental to the seven-year-old ears listening.

Worse yet…I should have felt it. Eyes peering to see how we weigh the world…in light of ourselves…in light of Him.

And why do we forget that He is there?  Why do we ignore the reality…that people are not property and faces should never have grading mechanisms.  

Why did I forget that? The one who chants constantly to her children...”Man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart”.

When will we…I….quit with the labels?  When will we accept each other…strangers….regardless of the various packages people come in?

For in reality; short skirts, tattooed skin, pierced noses, eyebrows, or lips…doesn’t determine a person’s God-sized-heart…or how He might choose to use them. 

For sometimes the things we say when we think no one in listening, burns deeper into hearts than those words we speak carefully, thought out, calculated…in front of other people.

“Look at you,”  I tell my seven-year-old, tucked tight for winter. “Beautiful skin, a long, thin frame.  You are absolutely sooo beautiful!”  Water squirts from my eyes, wishing I had dark skin just like her…so she would believe more fully the words I was saying.

It was the story.  I know it.  I try to justify.  The story of Leah and Rachel her Daddy read to her in the Bible before bedtime.  I just know it.  Blame shifting in hopes to find some way to make myself feel better.

Him reading….

No wonder a second grader would fear what we all fear; that feeling of being ugly, unwanted, not beautiful…rejected.  

Who would have guessed that the Bible would address something in oh, so, blatant terms.  I failed at understanding.

And oh what do you tell a little girl who spins in fancy dresses, talks about being a princess, and notices things like conversations spoken innocently in front of others, such as…“Who is pretty and who is not.”

And doesn’t everyone know….Princesses HAVE to be beautiful?

I wake and dig into scripture.  Looking to God for some answers to this deli-ma that didn’t disappear as I slept….“Leah’s eyes were delicate, but Rachel was beautiful in form and appearance.”   That Jacob.  Looking at outward appearance.  Who does that?  (…Oh ya….Me!)  Ugh.

But then I keep reading…

Yes, Jacob wanted Rachel.  Jacob loved Rachel.  But Rachel wasn’t exactly an angel.  So…“When the Lord saw that Leah was unloved, He opened her womb; but Rachel was barren.”

That’s it!  My mom was right, “Beauty is as beauty does.”

And oh how I want to have a list ready for my daughter when she comes home from school.  “Beauty is…”  And “You are beautiful because….”

But I have learned, we can never tell someone something God hasn’t showed them first.  So, I will pray, ask God, and sit down with my daughter to share how God loved Leah.  How God chose Leah to be the Mother of Levi; whose descendants were Moses, Aaron, and John the Baptist.

I will share with her how Leah was also blessed and was the mother of Judah, whose children are the Jews.  King David, Judah’s descendant.  But most of all sharing how Judah is in the direct line and ancestry of Jesus Christ himself.

So what does it pay to be beautiful according to our worlds standards?  What does it matter if blonde haired, blue eyes girls are still plastering the cover of magazines?

Because beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. And God says…“I have made you in my image…How can you NOT be beautiful!”

I see her dark eyes flash and twinkle. The delicacy of those soul seeking, truth wanting realities crying out to know her identity.

And I see her heart…the heart of one eager.  One who is the Lord’s chosen, beautiful, loved, special…

Beautiful on both the outside and the inside….just like all of us.  Regardless of the color of our skin, regardless of the scars, or weight, or piercings that decorate us.  Regardless of the wrinkles, our height, regardless of where we live or what we drive….

We are all Christs.  We are all beautiful.  We are all fearfully, and wonderfully made in His sight.

I ask you today friend, do you know that God in heaven looks down on you with delight?  Do you fully grasp and see and know that no matter your plight…He see you as beautiful?