“Beauty invites
a certain curiosity. But beauty is just five minutes long if you don’t have
anything else to sustain that curiosity.”
Monica Bellucci
“Pretty is
as pretty does.”
Ever hear
that?
With so much
fixation on appearance, it probably has not been heeded with seriousness.
Let’s face
it, in this society, look matter.
And,
unfortunately, we learn that lesson early. I certainly did.
As a
little girl, my mother and I had a rating system for females, focusing on those
exact words. It was not uncommon for the two of us to focus on a friend, a
classmate, a teacher or a celebrity and decide where she fell under the “Cute, pretty, beautiful and small” system. Great
mother/daughter bonding, huh?
And it wasn’t just a judge-y
sport, it also underscored a dominant rule which eventually sparked my
full-blown eating disorder behaviors: anorexia, bulimia, binge eating and, of
course, constant self-loathing.
It sprang from the curiosity
I had with beauty. It started with fairytale princesses and aesthetically
pleasing dolls; they were aspirational focus points.
But somewhere, things took a dark turn. Cute
eating disorders.
“...They were now competition
for me. If I could be thinner than these women, then I’d be better than they
were as well… Competition grew between me and any thin girl or woman. Mirror,
mirror: I had to be the thinnest one of them all. It was life or death
importance, anything less than that was unacceptable. Gaining any weight,
whatsoever, meant failure, simple as that...What I didn’t realize at the time
was that my eyes and mind were incapable of seeing anything but a distorted
image...”
(Excerpt from “Thin
Enough: My Spiritual Journey Through the Living Death Of An Eating Disorder”)
Try as I might, no matter
what I did, I could never perfectly attain that fuzzy four star rating. And so,
what was I? Answer: an ugly failure.
Why
aren’t we enough?
It’s because we don’t see what God sees. We are curious about
temporal, often distorted, inaccurate and harmful depictions of beauty rather
than God’s eternal, spiritual truths.
Therefore,
we need God’s beauty/value rating system.
Check out The
Song of Solomon:
1:15: “Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves'
eyes.”
2:14: “O my dove…let me see your form…for your form is lovely.”
4:1: “Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast
doves' eyes...”
4:7: “Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.”
6:4: “Thou art beautiful, O my love...”
7:10: “I am my beloved's, and his desire is toward me.”
Beauty is
part of who we are, but it’s only one aspect. There’s so much more to our
inherent value.
Let’s get
curious about the full package, not just appearance!!!!
“...I am fearfully and
wonderfully made…”
Psalm 139:14
Copyright © 2015 by
Sheryle Cruse
No comments:
Post a Comment