you are more beautiful than you think

Two weeks ago I wrote for the Enterprise on discipline of the body.  As I hurriedly sent that column off, I mused that when we do discipline our bodies, it is often for the wrong reasons.  Especially is that true of us who are female.  We exercise and diet so we can fit into a smaller size jeans; pluck, dye and trim our hair in an attempt to look younger; bake our skin so we look a little more like the bronzed women on the front of the magazines that line the grocery store checkout. 

And in the end, we don’t believe that we are very attractive even after we do these things.

My trouble with self-perception began in junior high with insecurity about my clothes and my glasses.  It continued into high school, when I started wishing for a narrower face and a curvier figure.  My self-consciousness heightened with every new pimple.  My teeth were not white enough.  My hair not the right style.  I think that every woman I know can relate to this – at least to some degree or another.

Why is it that when someone remarks on how pretty we look in a new dress, we launch into a lengthy discourse about how we purchased it from the clearance rack at Kohls?  Or when our husbands give us a hug and say, “You’re so beautiful, honey,” we offer five pieces of evidence that prove the erroneous nature of such a remark?  (Often our objections have to do with our figures or our face not looking like they used to, when the reality is we weren’t happy with them back then, either!) Instead of affirming to a friend how beautiful she is, we speculate what we could do with our hair or what clothes we should buy in order to look like she does...rather than give her a likely much-needed, sincere compliment.

The other week the kids and I were in the dairy section of King Soopers waiting for an elderly lady to get a gallon of milk out of the cooler.  As we stood there, another woman swooped in, squeezed the old lady by the arm, and said, “You have the most beautiful snow-white hair I have ever seen.  It’s just lovely.”  That startled little woman beamed from ear to ear as she shuffled away with her grocery cart.

Our self-perception is about much more than disciplining our bodies, isn’t it?  It requires disciplining our minds, the topic of the column that I wrote for this week’s Enterprise.  (The video I linked below demonstrates that.  That’s why I post it here, not to advertise for Dove.)  In many respects, the children of this generation are wiser than we who are the children of light (Luke 16:8).  They believe that this life is all there is, that outward beauty defines a person’s worth, and that's how they live.  We say that we don’t believe those things, but often we live like we do those lies, don’t we?

Instead, we should discipline our bodies because God’s Spirit dwells within us.  It’s His temple.  We desire that that temple be as strong and as lovely as it can be.  But we discipline that body remembering that it is not the earthen vessel itself that gives us worth, it is the treasure which that vessel holds (2 Cor. 4:7).  What makes us beautiful is the reality that (as Hopkins so marvelously expresses it): 

Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the feature of men’s faces.

Dear friend, you are more beautiful than you think.