beautiful in God's eyes

What does it mean to be beautiful? Is there a standard that makes one person beautiful and another person not? Is beauty something that can be attained? Or is it just something that one is? Does God's definition of beauty differ from the world's? How is it different? How does God define beautiful?

Those are just some of the questions that have been running through my head for the last couple of months. They were triggered by a Bible study on the book of Esther that I've been doing. In Esther 2 there is recorded King Xerxes' search for a new queen, and the search is based on finding beautiful women for him to choose from. As I read that chapter and began digging into the study, I found myself wondering if I would have been chosen if I had been alive in that time, and if I would have wanted to be chosen.

And then I moved on to thinking about what the standards for finding beautiful women would have been of this were to take place today. To be honest, that was a bit of a depressing train of thought as I stopped and really paid attention to what our world calls beautiful. In so many ways, that standard is something that would be impossible to meet for most people. And so there has developed a market for a seemingly endless supply of beauty products and large numbers of women having various surgeries to try to fight aging and look forever young.Now, before you think I'm against anything we might call a beauty product, there is nothing wrong with making use of those things. The problem comes in when looking beautiful becomes our focus and the driving force behind using them.

I think there is another problem with the standard of what our world tells us is beautiful. Sometimes I wonder if it is a bigger problem, but less talked about. I wonder if there are just as many women who look at what our world says is beauty and realize that they can never attain that. But for them, rather than go to great lengths to attempt to, they choose to run the other way - to get as far from that definition of beauty as possible. For whatever reason they are convinced that they can never be beautiful and so they do everything possible not to look beautiful in any way.

I also wonder if this thinking gets transferred into how we see God looking at us. We feel like we're not beautiful according to the world's standards and so we assume that we're not beautiful according to God's standards either. Not realizing how distorted this thinking is, it affects our relationship with God along with how we interact with others we see as being beautiful.

So, what does it mean to be beautiful in God's eyes? Is it an external thing? Or is it just something internal?

We've all heard 1 Samuel 16:7 about God looking at the heart, not the outward appearance many times. It's a great reminder that it's what is on the inside that matters most. But, does it really mean that the outside doesn't matter at all? Does it mean that a sort of "spiritual beauty" is all we should concerned about, rather than paying attention to a physical beauty?

The more I've thought about this, the more I have wondered about the place for physical beauty in the life of a follower of Christ. I mean, if we're not to pay attention to outward appearance - to physical beauty - why did God make beauty something we long for? We live in a world that is full of beautiful things and it is something we seek. I don't think this is something that is wrong. God created us this way, but fallen humanity has warped what God meant to be good. Song of Solomon talks much about physical beauty, but rather than holding up an impossible to reach standard it praises the beauty that is already there.

I don't find anywhere in the Bible that lays out specific guidelines for what makes someone beautiful or not. That seems to be something that is left up to us. But, I also don't see anywhere in the Bible that tells us we have to ignore beauty. The desire to be seen as beautiful - to feel beautiful - is something God created in us and we can't ignore it. We will seek for people to see us as beautiful. But, I wonder if most of the time, the best person to go to when we want to know if we are beautiful is God. His answer will be "yes" because He made us beautiful exactly the way He created us.

Yet, I know that this isn't always enough for our hurting hearts. We long to hear - we need to hear - another person tell us we are beautiful. That is true whether we have embraced all our world tells us will make us beautiful or run as far we can get from that - we long to hear another person tell us we are beautiful. Sometimes when we need to hear those words, we need to be open to them coming from a source we didn't know they would. They may not come from where we expect, but God can use someone to let us know - even when we don't expect it from them.

God's Invisible Hand

In a world where God seems distant

Or like He's just not there

It really makes you wonder

If God just doesn't care

But look beneath the surface

Watch behind the stage

God still works His plans out

In this present age

Sometimes He's front and center

Part of His plans' hatching

Sometimes He seems to quiet

You wonder if He is watching

Times when God seems silent

Then He still is working

Leading people's actions

As they go on looking

In a world where God seems distant

Or like He's just not there

You never have to wonder

If God does really care

grad reunions, weddings . . . reminders of singleness or something more?

Do you ever find yourself at the point where you wonder where the time has gone? And how it could have gone so fast? Then you begin to take stock of your life and compare where you are actually at to where you imagined you would be at this point. Some things have gone completely differently than you imagined - some things have gone exactly as you thought - and there are still some things you are hoping will happen.

That is the place I found myself about a month ago when I got the Facebook invite to my 10 year grad reunion. I had to recheck the year, because I was sure that it could not be that time already. But it is - 10 years after a graduation in 2001, is 2011 - this year. I started to think about all that the last 10 years had been filled with - and all that was still missing that I thought would happen in this time.

The more I thought about it, the more I found the list of things I felt were still missing in my life growing. And that list grew at a much faster rate than the list of all that had happened. It seemed as though there were a lot of things in the list of what I felt was missing that seemed to somehow be bigger or more important than the things I had done.

I really was not sure I wanted to go to my grad reunion when I got the invite. For the most part, school was not the greatest for me friends-wise and so by high school I really had given up on trying to really make friends. I had people I could sit with in class and have as lab partners, but not really friends. And so I was not sure that I wanted to go to my grad reunion ALONE. It seemed that it was little more than a reminder that I was still single - long past when I thought I would get married. I had always thought I would have a husband to take with me to this event.

And really, did I need my grad reunion to be another reminder that I was still single? Last May my youngest sister got married . . . before me. And this May, my other younger sister is getting married . . . before me. I do not begrudge them at all. They have both found amazing guys that I am glad are my brother-in-laws. But I always thought because I was the oldest I would get married first. I knew the world did not work that way, but I thought it anyways. For the last 16 or so months, my world has had a lot of wedding talk happening in it. Sometimes it is good - sometimes it gets to be too much and I wish I could hide from the world.

So I have been left to wonder how I will choose to view these events. Will I choose to see my grad reunion as little more than a reminder that my life is not what I had planned? (As if my plans have any bearing on what God plans anyways.) Or will I choose to go and enjoy catching up and use the reminder that it has been 10 years to focus on all that has happened in my life, rather than what has not? Will I choose to see my sisters' getting married before me as a reason to be depressed that I am still single? Or will I choose to celebrate their love and welcome my brothers (even when they try to shove cupcakes in my face)?

I sometimes think that in a world that sets us up to always want more - always want the best - to never be satisfied with what we have, it would be easy to look at these events and see only the downside of them, to see them as only reminders of singleness for longer than I wanted. But, I wonder if instead, they need to be turned into opportunities to praise God for what He has done in our lives.

I may not have been married, or bought a house, or any of those plans I was so sure would happen in the last 10 years. But I know that I have done many things - graduated from college, found a better job than I imagined I could, moved out with some great friends - and that God has done some incredible things in me as He shapes me more and more in His image. Those are things I need to focus on. Those are the things that matter. And as I choose to focus on the things that God has done in and through me, the other things fade into the background. The desire and hope for them does not go away - and I do not think it should. But what is most important takes over the larger part of my life and other things fall better into the places they should be.