Do you long to be beautiful?

I have yet to meet the woman who doesn't have an inner longing to be beautiful.

Stasi Eldridge and her husband talk a lot about this truth in their book Captivating. We're all more than aware of how the fashion and cosmetics industries capitalize on this need in the souls of women.

My own recognition of this need in myself and others caused me to be quite captivated by a few scriptures I came across during my time with God this morning.

I was reading in Ephesians 5:26-27, focusing on what Christ has done for His church. But the way Eugene Peterson paraphrased these verses, specifically the 2nd half of the 26th verse, in The Message especially caught my attention. He put it this way:

Christ's love makes the church whole. His words evoke her beauty.

Christ's words evoke the beauty of His bride, the church. So how can I hear Christ's words?

Certainly the Holy Spirit speaks to my heart. The Holy Spirit also takes the Bible and quickens it to my soul and mind. I truly believe that studying God's Word, taking in what it says, changes us. Brings out the beauty within which God created us to exude. I believe this includes both internal and external beauty.

Ecclesiastes 8:1 reminds me:

Who is like the wise man? Who knows the explanation of things? Wisdom brightens a man's face and changes its hard appearance.

Have you ever looked into the face of physically attractive person, but found them unattractive because of something "hard" about their face? Perhaps something in the eyes or expression. Or have you ever met someone who looked old beyond their years, like they'd had a terrible life? There's no doubt that who we are, how we've lived, affects how we appear.

What kind of beauty is it that you long for?

Healing Tears

Tears can bring healing.

Yet so many of us were thoroughly steeped in the tradition of being strong, hearing that we either needed to "take it like a man", or that "big girls don't cry". That somehow our grief was wrong.

I can remember for years how I sublimated my pain and grief; how I only let it come out when I was reading a book or watching a movie. Then, while alone and reading, or in that dark movie theater, I would let myself vicariously experience the pain of someone else, and cry. That was my relief valve.

Through the years God has shown me the value of grieving, morning, and shedding tears. I've learned that it's an easier pain to just go with it for a time, to allow myself to feel the hurt. I've found that the pain will not consume me to such an extent that I will never be able to function again. That I can just let it out and receive God's comfort. I've experienced feeling through the pain to the other side when I can move on in life, past the pain.

Just recently, for a reason about which I am unclear, God is bringing me back to teaching about tears. As I'm studying the book Captivating by Stasi Eldridge with some friends, I've been reminded of a long ago favorite Bible passage from Psalm 56:8-10 (NLT):

⁸ You keep track of all my sorrows.
You have collected all my tears in your bottle.
You have recorded each one in your book.

⁹ My enemies will retreat when I call to you for help.
This I know: God is on my side!
¹⁰ I praise God for what he has promised;
Yes, I praise the Lord for what he has promised.

Sometimes life just hurts. We all know it.

I'm so grateful that we have a God who is moved by our sorrow, for whom we are so important that He who created the universe takes note of each tear. I adore this quote from St. Augustine in his Confessions:

"The tears...streamed down, and I let them flow as freely as they would, making them a pillow for my heart. On them it rested."

Grief, tears, expressions of mourning - they all are a form of validation. They say that the hurt mattered. I'm grateful to know that the hurts matter to God as well.

What's something God's taught you about tears?

Beauty Forgotten

I've been working through the study guide and book Captivating by Stasi Eldridge with some friends. As I was reading this week I was really struck by these words of Eldridge:

"Beauty is essential to God. No - that's not putting it strongly enough. Beauty is the essence of God.

The first way we know this is through nature, the world God has given us."

I'm reminded of Romans 1:20 (NIV):

For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

Makes sense to me that if creation shows God's qualities - that God must embody beauty.

There's also that verse in Isaiah 6:3 (NIV):

And they were calling to one another:
"Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory."

The earth, nature, is full of God's glory. It's apparent that one aspect of God's glory is beauty.

Sometimes I think we are so focused on doing, on things being functional, that we fail to notice beauty. But as I look in nature I see plenty of beautiful things; things that the beauty serves no other purpose than to delight the one seeing and experiencing it.

The power of beauty is so strong, that our culture has caught on to it's power and importance. But in our ignorance of beauty's source, we've missed beauty's substance and purity, and have idealized a corrupted form of beauty. We've limited beauty to a very specific, stringent, criteria that really has nothing to do with true beauty.

Beauty nourishes and enlarges the soul.

Just yesterday I was out hiking behind our house. When you go behind our house you start hiking upward and it opens up into the national forest, it seems that nobody but my family typically hikes there. Due to the light snow the prior night, everything was pristine and it was as if the dog and I were in our own wonderland. Periodically, I stopped hiking and would just gaze about me. I could look up at the mountain tops covered in tress and snow, with a fog beginning to waft about them, weaving in and out among the trees. I could look down into the desert below where the sun was shining and the clouds were dotted about beneath me. I could look at the pure, white, unblemished snow around me. I felt a sense of peace envelope me. I experienced a lightness, a freedom from the challenges in my life. It was as if my heart swelled within me. I was refreshed as I hiked back down to the house.

Beauty does that for me; and God is beauty.

Have you experienced beauty nourishing your soul? Have you had a time when out in nature, or when listening to a concert, or when in the company of someone beautiful, that God replenished you? Can you think of a time when God used beauty to increase you capacity to experience Him?

Are you looking at the clouds or the Son?

Sometimes God has blessed me, but I'm so focused on negative circumstances, or how things didn't go my way, that I fail to notice. I miss enjoying the good that is in my life.

This truth hit me again today when I was doing a Bible study for my small group. Myself and 4 other women are working through the book and study guide for Captivating by Stasi Eldridge. One of the questions was about what it means to be romanced. As I wrote about what it means to me to be romanced - to be important to someone, adored, delighted in, so important that that someone will go out of his way to do special things for me, it hit me that my husband John does all these things. I was overcome with gratitude for God's gift to me in John.

But you know what? Just three years ago, after one year of being married, I was feeling unloved and not special because this same man goes off without me for several days a few times a year to hike, back pack and commune with God in the outback of Yosemite. I was feeling like he didn't love me because he didn't want to spend time with me. So I began praying about it and soon God changed my heart. I began to see that this is something John does to keep himself healthy; that he recharges his batteries by that time alone in nature with God. I also began to see that loving another means accepting him exactly how he is and allowing him to be himself. Not every man needs to get away by himself for a few days out in nature a few times each year - but John does - and it's John that I love.

Now John has most likely always periodically bought me flowers because he knows I adore their beauty, found books he thinks I'd like in second hand stores, complimented me frequently about many things, and proclaimed that for him I'm part of the proof of Ephesians 3:20 - that God will give us blessing beyond what we can think and imagine. But three years ago I was so busy focusing on the fact that he wants to spend several days a few times each year away from me - that I didn't notice. I was so busy focusing on what was not going the way I thought it should, that I wasn't enjoying the blessings in my life.

I'm sure grateful that God got my attention and that today I can see and enjoy His goodness to me in John.

Do you ever miss out on enjoying God's blessings to you because you're focusing on the stuff in your life that isn't exactly as you want it? What helps you keep your focus on the blessing God gives you in each day?