Guest Post by Anna Kate
For me, beauty used to be a HUGE problem in my life. It honestly held me back from a closer relationship with God until He showed me the following 3 things:
BEAUTY IS A TOOL
Beauty is a tool. I believe that it is a gift from God that we can utilize to make good first impressions, please our spouses, create art, attract mates, and much more.
Using beauty as a tool means taking on beauty as a responsibility. Beauty can be used for good, or for evil.
I think that as women, we can embrace our femininity at the appropriate times, gussy up, and look beautiful. We can do this to honour God, honour our spouse, and honour ourselves.
But I also think beauty can be used for evil. I believe that we should never, absolutely never, exploit our beauty for personal gains. I see nothing wrong with putting on an extra coat of eye liner and teasing your hair before your big date, but we should never use our beauty to manipulate other people, get out of taking responsibility for our mistakes, or to seduce the eye of men.
I’ve seen girls with my exact body type stretching and posing on social media in tiny dresses and high heels, amassing tens of thousands of followers with each shot of their body. Do you think that is what God intended their beauty for?
So much of Instagram, even for Christian women, is focused on the perfect selfie, the candid photo posed just right to make our legs look slender, or the “bikini on a yacht pic.” Can I just say, what the heck are we doing here people!?
Why are we creating content that causes fellow believers to stumble? Why are we creating content that draws others to covet, compare, lust, and envy!? We are explicitly commanded to not draw others into sin. Are we really so tied up into the praise of humans that we need to undress and pose on camera, regardless of who we hurt chasing that admiration?
BEAUTY CAN QUICKLY TURN INTO AN IDOL
People idolize money whether they are in poverty or the owner of three Lamborghinis. The same goes for beauty. You can idolize beauty whether you look like Tyra Banks, or you could only dream of looking like Tyra Banks.
We idolize beauty in our Instagram age.
I do not use Instagram and stopped using it because it made beauty such an MASSIVE idol in my life. I was coveting the beauty of others and trying to compete with them in the digital beauty pageant that is Instagram. YUCK!
If you find yourself stressing about beauty on a daily basis, maybe it’s time to ask God what the heck is going on. Freaking out about a bad hair day or an oily pimple is different than stressing out about every beautiful girl you see online or in person. That’s comparison, and that’s a problem: I would know. I used to be psycho intense about comparison, and it was all because I idolized beauty.
You cannot value beauty so highly that if you lost it, it would wreck you. You also cannot value beauty so highly that you allow your lack of “conventional beauty” to hold you back from chasing your dreams, using your talents, or trying to flirt with a nice guy.
Beauty does not determine your life.
BEAUTY IS FINICKY…
In my opinion, if you are healthy, your skin glows, and you’ve got a great head of hair, then you’re objectively beautiful. But that’s just my opinion.
It seems like the Western world has made beauty so elite that only the towering women from Deutschland get to strut their stuff in the Victoria’s Secret show or the red carpet. We praise these women for being beautiful: we even call them Angels.
But would these Amazonian beauties have been considered Angels 100 years ago? Nope! They would have been considered malnourished. Beauty is finicky and it is always changing.
In the 80’s all of our moms dreamed of looking like Farrah Fawcett! Now, high school girls would scoff at Farrah’s lack of..ahem..derriere. Instead, we can check out our local gym to see girls squatting their lives away, trying to achieve Kylie Jenner’s larger than life bottom.
Bottom line (pun intended)… BEAUTY IS FINICKY.
Trust me, 100 years from now the pinnacle of “beautiful” might only include women from Asian descent with pink hair and extremely long necks. Who even knows.
FINAL THOUGHTS…
At the end of the day, we need to focus on the Biblical truth that the most beautiful in the world isn’t Kylie Jenner, Doutzen Kroes, or Fan Bingbing (oh Fan. She’s gorgeous.)
The most beautiful in the world is the Most High God!
I think that when I stopped fretting about if I was beautiful and really just rested in the fact that God is beautiful, my heart finally felt at peace.
I made steps to remove beauty as an idol in my life. No, I didn’t stop wearing makeup or chop my hair in an extremist effort to rid myself of beauty. Instead, I befriended and embraced beauty as a gift from God. I cut out the things in my life that encouraged comparison (ahem…Instagram…) and I decided to place beauty on a lower shelf of importance.
We will never be satisfied in our own beauty. We just won’t. You can’t rely on your beauty to get you through life or get you the man.
You need to rely on the beauty of God and the beauty of His plan for you. He may use your measure of beauty as a tool in His Grand Plan (for your life or to get the man,) but He will probably pair up that tool with other things about you: your talents, your virtues, and your personality.
Your level of beauty does not determine your life.
One verse has stuck with me since I was 11 years old: “Charm is deceptive and beauty is fleeting, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.” (Proverbs 31:30).
So let’s focus on how beautiful the Lord is because honestly, it’s too exhausting trying to keep up with what the world says is beautiful, and according to the Bible, beauty is gonna pick up and walk away someday, whether we like it or not.
the rambling missionary 