But Pretty Girls Are Worth More! (part 5)

Written by: Nancy Leigh Demoss

“When you’re not blonde and thin, you come up with a personality real quick.”
~Kathy Najimy

Our view of ourselves either enables us to do what God has created us to do or it limits us from becoming all He means for us to be. It is critical that you dismantle any lies you may believe about yourself concerning your worth. Now, I don’t think many girls would come right out and say that they have to be as beautiful as an airbrushed model on a magazine, but we do have insanely unreal expectations for ourselves in this area. It’s just a fact!

Maybe you aren’t going to make People’s 100 Most Beautiful list. Perhaps you don’t have the great blonde locks of Heidi Klum or the statuesque beauty of Tyra Banks. I’m sure hoping you don’t make the same “fashion” decisions that many of the young celebrities make. I believe that God created you and that you are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14).

At the same time, I can certainly understand that the world’s standard of so-called beauty has made it hard to see your own worth. Many of the girls I talked to said that they feel ugly or fat or both. Others said they hated themselves and felt worthless because of how they looked. There is an underlying sense that if you don’t meet a certain standard of “beauty,” you don’t have value; you don’t matter. OUCH! Lies we believe about our appearance can be deadly and so difficult to overcome. We can know the truth in our heads and still find ourselves reeling from the emotions of it all.

“I know that what is most important is who I am in Christ, but if I get emotional and quit thinking with my head, I start to feel like outer beauty is more important than inner beauty even though I know that’s wrong. I abandon reason in favor of emotion…

“This year I even missed a lot of school because I was depressed about how I looked. I can get so worked up about my face or my hair or my body in the morning that it ruins my whole day. My mom has to drag me to school, and I run to the bathroom to check myself out one more time before I head to class. If I can’t handle it, I call her and make up something about having cramps or whatever. I just hate that I get like this.”

Though I’ve never gone quite that far, I have battled many of the same thoughts and emotions. I do remember wearing a baseball cap low over my face because I always felt too ugly to show it off. I can even remember wearing really baggy clothes just because I always felt that my body was too hideous to be seen by the public. Isn’t this insane?

There’s nothing new about our preoccupation with how things look on the outside. I’m convinced that it is something women have struggled with in every generation. I already talked about how the forbidden fruit appealed to Eve’s desire for wisdom. But equally important, it was beautiful. The Enemy succeeded in getting her to value the physical appearance of a piece of fruit over less visible qualities such as trust and obedience. The problem wasn’t that the fruit was beautiful, but that she placed physical appearance above her relationship with God. In doing so, she believed and acted on a lie. And we’re still doing it today! In fact, the list of how we act out is long:

* Some check other girls out and enter into tremendous self-loathing…
* Some check other girls out and say nasty things about them…or even in front of them.
* Some will do just about anything to be affirmed by a guy. Anything!
* Some cut themselves and bleed if they can’t make the cut.
* Some dress in such a way as to intentionally cause boys and men to look and want…
* Some dress that way just to fit in, following the crowd’s immodesty…
* Some are flirtatious…
* Some overspend…
* Some just lie in bed and cry about it…

How do you stop the cycle? First, remember that physical beauty in this world is temporary. I realize that may not be what you wanted to hear! But you don’t want a quick, temporary fix, do you? You want healing at the deepest level. So you’ve got to go to the Word of God for the Truth. It reminds us that “charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain” (Proverbs 31:30). Every older woman you know can attest to the fact that external beauty is fleeting and that our culture’s obsession with staying young-looking is an exercise in futility! But there is a kind of beauty that does last:

“Do not let your adorning be external--the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear--but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious” (1 Peter 3:3-4).

These verses aren’t saying you can’t shop ‘til you drop (as long as you don’t overspend) or that having a great new haircut is sinful. Nowhere does Scripture condemn physical beauty or our expression of it. What is condemned is giving excessive attention to your outward beauty while you neglect the beauty of your heart!

Being a tomboy, I was never much for makeup and girly clothes. It is only after I have gotten older that I have started testing these things out. I began putting on the makeup and stuff……although, I will say it isn’t as easy as other girls make it appear. That little eyelash brush always seems to find it’s way into my eye every time. But the point is, I was wearing girl clothes and makeup and I walked out into the kitchen where all of my family was sitting. I presented myself in front of them all, “Well, what do you think?” There was a long silence as they all looked me over carefully. And then they said, “What? What are we supposed to be looking at here?” I couldn’t believe it! They didn’t even notice!

It was at that point that I decided not to focus so much on my looks. Hey, if my family doesn’t even notice when they live with me, how much will the public notice? I started to focus on my inner beauty even more. Does that mean I walk around looking like a ragbag? No! Of course not! I still make myself presentable, only I don’t make that the most important thing…and now…instead of avoiding the mirror……I am no longer afraid to look into it. Now, I’m not looking at it and saying, “Whoa! Babe, you are hot!” But I am also not fearfully avoiding it. No, I am looking in the mirror and simply sensing, “God made a good thing.” You will likely never be at peace with how God created you until you grasp this: You’ve got to be more focused on your internal beauty than your external beauty.

Believe me, you will not regret this. If you begin cultivating inner beauty--such character traits as love, grace, mercy, joy, kindness--you will not be disappointed. I’ve seen plenty of girls who wouldn’t be characterized as physical knockouts, but who radiate an inner beauty that is truly captivating and that can only be attributed to their relationship with Jesus.

Here’s a simple test to determine if you’re focused on the kind of beauty that lasts:

TODAY, DID YOU SPEND MORE TIME: in front of the mirror, making yourself beautiful on the outside or in God’s Word, developing inner beauty of heart and character?

It’s that simple. God wants you to groom your heart. The beauty that matters most to God is on the inside, but it will be reflected in how you present yourself on the outside. Your sense of fashion should reflect what’s inside. The apostle Paul wrote about how women should dress. He encouraged women to “adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, but with what is proper for women who profess godliness” (1 Timothy 2:9-10).

Your outward appearance should reflect your heart. Your heart should be pure. That’s why modesty is so important. Your heart should be joyful. That’s why I give a big thumbs-down to the dark goth or EMO style. Your heart should be filled with life. That’s why the trendy skull and crossbones should be passed up. You’re supposed to represent life, not walking death. What is on the outside should be represented of what’s on the inside.

What you believe about beauty will be determined by where you look. I admit that it’s hard to separate the inside and the outside. That’s why I’m going to go right to the heart of an important side issue: teen magazines. Many of the Christian girls I talked to had stacks of them at home. And reading them didn’t seem to be doing anything good. Here’s what a few said:

“I get Seventeen magazine, and they are saying, ‘We are starting to use real models, ones that aren’t so skinny.’ But the real models are still skinnier than the majority of people. It makes me feel like I’m not that skinny and that I’m never going to get anywhere.”

“I get this kind of high while I’m looking through one. I kind of think that I’ll look like that, but then I look in the mirror and I find myself worse off than before. I’ll never look like that.”

Would it help you to be reminded that even the women in the magazines don’t look like that? Actress Kate Winslet once said it succinctly. She was featured on the cover of a British issue of GQ looking svelte and sexy. But was she? She said, “I do not look like that…And more importantly, I don’t desire to look like that. They’ve reduced the size of my legs by about a third.”

They don’t look that way! And they feel the same pressure you feel to measure up to an unhealthy, unattainable standard. Actress Keira Knightley recently said, “I’m twice the size, height and everything else of most of the other actresses who are going for an audition. It’s mad, isn’t it? When you realize that even at my size I’m one of the largest there. It’s at that point you start to say, ‘I don’t think it’d be healthy for me to stay here much longer.’”

The press estimates her height at 5’7 and her weight to be about 115 pounds. She probably wears a size 2 or 4 most of the time. And she’s big??! The world’s standard of outward beauty is unattainable. God’s standard of beauty can be achieved by time spent alone with Him, and that inner beauty will make you confident with what God has given you on the outside.

And if it makes you feel any better, whatever defect or “ugly” part that you supposedly hate about your earthly body, will be fixed and beautified soon enough. You see, the Bible tells us that when we get to Heaven He will fix those things and our bodies will be completely perfected. If you don’t think you’re beautiful now you will be eventually…

Those two scars on my face will be gone. That annoying pain in my pinky toe that I got from breaking it five times will no longer hurt when I step on it wrong. And the four fillings in my teeth that I attained as a sugar-crazed eight-year-old will no longer be needed because I will no longer have those cavities. Our bodies will be perfected. We will be like Christ. So, don’t worry……you won’t always have to be your imperfect self. It won’t last forever…

This series is continued...