Day Fourteen

It runs through my mind like a melody. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Everything. He has made it beautiful. And, there is a time.

Ecclesiastes states that there is a time for everything, and everything on earth has its special season. There is a time to be born and a time to die. There is a time to plant and a time to pull up plants. There is a time to kill and a time to heal. There is a time to destroy and a time to build. There is a time to cry and a time to laugh. There is a time to be sad and a time to dance. There is a time to throw away stones and a time to gather them. There is a time to hug and a time not to hug. There is a time to look for something and a time to stop looking for it. There is a time to keep things and a time to throw things away. There is a time to tear apart and a time to sew together. There is a time to be silent and a time to speak. There is a time to love and a time to hate. There is a time for war and a time for peace. (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8)

What season are you in? What time is it for you? Even as I revisited this scripture, I saw the times I am in. To be aware of the seasons is crucial in our lives, especially in this journey of beauty.

Due to my rushing things, I killed some things and put this journey on hold. But, due to the responses I have received, I see that God truly does have His seasons and that I didn’t fail at something, I merely paused and God has been working in the hearts and minds of you women in the moments of silence.

There is a great pain in our hearts. It is so evident in the things that have been sent to me in private and the comments posted publically. It is hard to see our beauty when the world slashes at us with their beauty knives and tell us that we could never live up to the standard they have created.

I don’t want to be a standard beauty. I want to be God’s description of beauty. He made me. With loving hands He crafted me, shaped my inward and outward parts. He made me beautiful. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, right? Who beholds us more, watches us every moment, can’t take His eyes off of us? It is in that that we discover that we truly are beautiful because He said so. Over and over and over again!

You are the most beautiful of women. Song of Songs 1:8a

My darling, you are beautiful! O, you are beautiful, and your eyes are like doves. Song of Songs 1:15

Among the young women, my darling is like a lily among thorns. Song of Songs 2:2

Show me your face, and let me hear your voice. Your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely. Song of Songs 2:14b

How beautiful you are, my darling! Oh, you are beautiful! Song of Songs 4:1a

My darling, everything about you is beautiful, and there is nothing at all wrong with you. Song of Songs 4:7

My darling, you are as beautiful as the city of Tirzah, as lovely as the city of Jerusalem, like an army flying flags. Song of Songs 6:4

You are beautiful and pleasant; my love, you are full of delights. Song of Songs 7:6

And I’m sure I missed some. The one that I placed in bold is one that thrills my heart. Imagine, you’re sitting at His feet and He’s telling you all the wonderful things you never thought of before, showing you delightful treasures your eyes have never seen before. After awhile, He grows silent and you lift your eyes to His. As you look at this wonderful Man who gave His life for you, His eyes filled with the reckless love He holds for you, you feel your heart skip a beat and you rest your head upon His knee, continuing to gaze at Him in abandon. He is amazingly perfect. So flawless, so kind, so handsome, and He loves you. He has assured you of this so many times and still never tires of telling you and showing you how much He loves you, how much you mean to Him.

A small smile touches your lips and He says, “My darling, everything about you is beautiful, and there is nothing at all wrong with you.”

You shut your eyes and allow His words to comfort you, deep down in your heart, where the wounds are deepest, where they are festering and poisoned, where they are infected and foul. It is like a fragrant balm spreading through you, soothing the pain away and healing you. Just like yesterday. Just like tomorrow.

How amazing is His love! And He insists that we see ourselves as He sees us. Beautiful. That is the purpose of this blog. That is the purpose of this journey. And, though we may hit some bumpy roads and hard days, though it will take us longer than I originally believed, by His grace and insistence, we will emerge with the beauty He created us with, the true beauty that no cosmetics, surgery, diet, hair style, or clothing could ever give to us.

The trait I chose today was hard to choose. I thought of just leaving this as an encouraging blog but I will pick a trait. I choose my voice. I know this isn’t a physical trait and I know that He revealed to me exactly how He felt about my voice early in this journey (He loves it!), but I’m choosing it because of the season.

The time has come to sing. Song of Songs 10:12b

As you will recall, in Ecclesiastes, there is a time to sing. This is the time. He made our voices beautiful and He loves for us to lift them in song. So, I choose my voice, in the realms of speaking and singing. What is your beauty trait?

Day Thirteen

I wanted to speak on my collarbone. It seemed to me that that was the next logical place for me to go. I let it sit in my mind for awhile, but as I skimmed the blogs that came before, I saw that I could do nothing without the inspiration of God and His tender, loving guidance.

This past weekend, as I was sitting with my family under a decorative windmill’s shadow, eating lunch in the pumpkin patch, I thought about how unattractive my weight made me. Even as I thought about my stomach pressing against my shirt, God spoke to me.

He told me that it all comes down to my poise, my posture, and the way that I see myself. Someone is beautiful when they are truly happy with who they are, when they are content with their beauty and stop trying to meet the unreachable standards of the media’s beauty.

As I thought about this, I could see what He was saying. In those moments when I am not consumed with how I look and how I don’t look, in those moments when I’m completely released from the chains of false beauty, those are the moments when I’m truly beautiful. The moment I allow the oppression to fall on me again, it is then that all things become darkened.

The verse He quickened to my mind as I thought on this was from Song of Solomon 4. Your neck is like David’s tower, built with rows of stones. A thousand shields hang on its walls; each shield belongs to a strong soldier. My darling, everything about you is beautiful, and there is nothing at all wrong with you. Song of Solomon 4:4, 7

It was that verse, the one about her neck being like the tower of David, that brought the revelation about poise and posture truly home. It has been bouncing around in my head for days now.

This morning, I thought about facing another day of beauty. I wanted to talk about my collarbone still, but I thought again of the Shulamite’s neck. The trait I choose for today, the trait I choose to acknowledge as beautiful, is my neck.

What trait do you choose? What has God shown you, even recently, that you have pushed down far within yourself and labelled as ‘pride’? How do you hope God will change the way you see yourself? Do you really believe that He will?

Faith, trust, so small, so simple, and so fleeting. God wants us to trust that He will change our perspective, not only about our own beauty, but about the beauty of others. I trust Him. Do you? I know now that my trust, or lack thereof, indicates the progress I will make with Him, both in this journey of beauty, but also in my daily life, with my daily struggles and trials. I am excited to see what He will renew in me as I go forward in this journey once more. I’m not limiting it to thirty days anymore…we’ll just go until He tells us to stop and see where He leads us. The posts may not be every day…that, too, will be entirely up to the Beloved and how often He speaks in regards to this.

Overcoming

Can you believe that it’s been over 4 months since I touched this blog? I can’t. It isn’t a proud moment of my life, knowing that I gave up on something God was actively moving in my life through.

I have felt a burning desire to return to this blog. However, I couldn’t find the time to do so. I’m thinking that it wasn’t so much that I didn’t have the time, but rather that I didn’t want to face the failure of my journey.

As I opened this blog again, I did it without thought. My intention, in all truth, was to open up the blog and make a ‘hard copy’ for me to revisit and to decide how to best approach this. As I was copying it over to a Word document, I thought about emailing all those who I had emailed throughout the journey. However, I realized that what I needed to do was start over.

I could feel God telling me that I didn’t need to start over completely. How could I revisit the things that He had done so powerfully? What would I do? Rewrite everything and hope that I felt the same? So, the choice is as it always is with Him: pick up from where you left off and continue forward.

I believe that God has a great many things He wants to do and speak and change and heal through this journey. I believe that we are wounded women, though we don’t like to admit it, and so we smile and act like everything in our lives are coming up roses when, in truth, we are being choked by the weeds.

I am weeding my garden. Who is ready to join me again?

Be encouraged. God loves us and wants us to see that we are beautiful. Not merely to profess and believe it, but to know it, down in our marrow and to live it, breathe it, be it. Beautiful.

I believe, based on outside pressure, that I rushed into the inner beauty portion of this journey. I now declare that this journey will not touch on inner-beauty. I believe that there will be another journey, after this one completes, where we will delve deeply into the truth about inner-beauty and discover what it means and express our truths about it. In those moments, we will discover beauties we never knew before.

For now, it’s about seeing ourselves as physically beautiful, quintessentially feminine, because our belief that we are not is the lie that God wants to remove from our lives forever.

So, starting tomorrow, a new physical beauty trait and a new blog full of revelations. We are on day thirteen at last. Are you ready?

Shalom!

Day Twelve

To look at inner-beauty the way I have will leave one frustrated and sorrowful. As I drove to church Sunday morning, I told God that He had to help me. The inner-beauty is hard for me to see and, for all the expressed desire for me to move past physical beauty into inner-beauty, I’ve only received one response and that was for the first day. Since then, I have received a second response.

God showed me Sunday morning that I’m looking at it all wrong. I’m trying to be these traits 100% of the time, perfectly. How easy it has been for God to show me my physical beauty amidst the “flaws”. How much easier will it be for Him to do the same with inner-beauty if I will only allow Him?

My physical trait is my legs. I don’t think that my legs are unattractive anymore. I use to think that long ago but now, thanks to God, no longer.

My inner-beauty trait is my loyalty. I always think of the chorus from the song “Close Your Eyes” by Ed Bear:

Close your eyes I’m right beside you,
Run for miles you know I’ll find you,
’cause it’s all the same, change your lovers, change your name,
When you need a friend…close your eyes I’m back again.

No matter what happens, in those hard moments, I would be there for them. Regardless of what transpired before and what was sure to come after, I would be there should they need me.

Same challenges, my friends. One physical and one inner-beauty trait that you now see as beautiful.

Day Eleven

This journey has taken a great deal longer than even I had intended when I began it. The reason for this is the days ‘missed’. I can’t blog without God leading the blog and so, even though I feel that I must blog, that I am obligated to make progress daily in this area, I must wait for my Beloved to speak. If I blog regardless, it will be me doing what I do best…blogging…and the revelation from God would be absent. So, here we are, day eleven!

I have noticed that it is easy for me to believe the truth about outer beauty. I can see myself differently now every time I look in the mirror. For me to discover another trait to acknowledge as beautiful is as simple as choosing one. I have decided that I would mention my arms today. I seem to be focused on that part of my body, I know, but as I notice things such as my wrists and hands, it was only natural to move on up to the arms.

My arms are usually given a bum wrap, with their farmer’s tan and freckles, but they are rather beautiful despite these things. One would not take the time to notice something like this regularly and I surely would not. However, today is the day that my arms receive their due. Beautiful arms, beautiful me.

Your arms are vines, covered with delicious fruits and all sorts of spices – henna, nard, saffron, calamus, cinnamon, frankincense, myrrh, and aloes – all the finest spices. Song of Songs 4:13-14

Inner-beauty. There is where I find myself lacking in belief. How odd it is that I find the hardest thing for most women as the simplest and the simplest as the hardest. The problem lies in the fact that I know who I am inside, even though I don’t know the whole truth yet. God knows who I am inside and He knows me far better than I know myself.

I asked God to reveal to me my inner-beauty traits. At least one…just one…so that I could write the blog and continue forward. So that I could see that there was beauty within me as well as without. I heard no answer last night.

This morning I woke up and wondered if day eleven should happen. I knew my outward beauty trait for the whole time I was waiting to write this blog. The inner-beauty continued to escape me.

What defines inner-beauty? Even as I listed the definitions, I could see my lack in those realms. So, what does that mean for me?

I would have believed that I would have been overly critical of my outer beauty. I had been for most of my life, after all. I discovered that I am overly critical of my inner-beauty instead.

For the sake of sounding together, most of us can list off our inner-beauty traits without even thinking about them. But what if we really and truly thought about them? Do we actually possess them? I have moments where I am considerate and kind but I am not always this way. I have moments when I am gentle and meek but not always. So, does this mean I’m ugly inside?

No.

What this means is that my inner-beauty is going to grow and be revealed, just as my outer beauty was. This means that I need to continue to rely on and listen to my Beloved and His voice as He reveals to me the things I fail to see when I look at myself.

So, my inner-beauty trait that I fell God showed me today is my faithfulness. I find that I desire to be faithful in my relationships and in my job and so I am. I find that the faithfulness grows stronger so long as my relationship with Jesus Christ is the center of the desire. And so, my faithfulness adds to my beauty.

The challenge today is simply what it will be from now until the end of this thirty day journey. Be sure to read the challenges, however, because God will inspire me to add to it once in awhile.

Challenge one is another beautiful physical trait and challenge two is another inner-beauty trait. Let God show you. If we do that, it’s easier than we imagine it to be.

Day Ten

I noticed a change this morning. The disgust I use to feel when my stomach would be visible under my shirt as I tied up my hair was absent. Wonderfully absent. I can see that God is truly doing a work in me, far beyond even I imagined when I began this journey. I notice, through conversations with some of you, that He’s doing the same in you. I am so delighted!

So, my trait for day ten is my hands. I noticed them the day I spoke of my wrists. There is a poem by E.E. Cummings that says, “Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands“. Though my hands aren’t delicate and slender, they are still beautiful. The more that I care for them, the more I appreciate them and admire them. The less I bite my nails, the more I delight in their length. It’s the little changes that make the biggest difference.

Sometimes we think there are things about us that are just too ‘ugly’ to be beautiful. It is the smallest change that delivers us from this prison. And the first change is to see differently. A year ago, I never would have been able to take this journey with any kind of success. Now, however, it seems almost effortless. The reason for this is that Jesus is changing things one day at a time.

Though I feel as though I have made great strides, and I have, I know that I’m nowhere near where I will be when this thirty day journey is complete. However, as a song by Miley Cyrus says, “Ain’t about how fast I get there, ain’t about what’s waiting on the other side, it’s the climb.”

Now, inner-beauty, that’s hard to tackle. I don’t fully understand inner-beauty. It was one of those moments when I sat there and really thought about it and couldn’t figure out what, exactly, made inner-beauty such a safe place to go to when one felt ugly outside.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, God says that it’s the beauty of a meek and gentle spirit. There was a couple of young women yesterday that I noticed were genuinely kind and helpful. I thought to myself how I want to be that kind.

I think that the traits of inner-beauty are genuine love, peace, kindness, gentleness, humility/meekness, compassion, and consideration. I’m sure there are a lot more than I have listed here. I see something that most of us don’t want to see. All the times that we’ve run to the inner-beauty sanctuary to feel better about the lies of the enemy, were we really safe there? How much inner-beauty do we actually possess?

If we allow God to change us in this area, we can have what He desires for us to have. Inner and outer beauty, confidence, assurance, joy, peace, and contentment.

Two challenges, of course. Another physical beauty trait and our first inner-beauty trait. Let it begin!

Day Nine

As the days continue to move in a steady rhythm, I notice a great deal of confidence filling me. With every passing day, I feel as though I am more beautiful than the day before. I feel hope in tomorrow, hope in acheiving the things my Beloved seeks for me to acheive, the very things that I can not acheive without Him.

As I remind myself that this journey has only just begun, I feel so near the end that it’s startling. Yet, here we are on day nine.

The physical trait I’ve chosen today are my wrists. I don’t know why, exactly, but they came to me mere moments before I began this blog. I wore the silver bracelet I bought in Mexico two years ago when I was visiting Yuma, AZ. Even though I know that it turns my wrist green (ahem), I still love to wear it. It is so pretty and hugs my wrist so perfectly, it defines my wrist, effectively setting apart my hand from my arm in defining elegance.

Wrists may seem like minute things, especially when there are areas that I have yet to call beautiful. But, there on the wrist, a butterfly kiss sends the pulse soaring. (I don’t know this from experience, I’m just assuming. Why wouldn’t it?) Why would someone kiss a wrist unless they found it beautiful, desirable, lovely?

There are things about us that we can’t seem to move past in this journey of beauty infusion. We need to understand what our Beloved sees when He looks at us. He sees our beautiful wrists in a completely different light than we ourselves see them. It is His desire for us to let go of the stigma of Cover Girl, the Gap, and Victoria Secret. There is no perfect body, no perfect beauty, no flawless woman.

Or is there?

What if I could have sixty queens, eighty wives, and thousands of others! You would be my only choice, my flawless dove, the favorite child of your mother. The young women, the queens, and all the others tell how excited you are as they sing your praises. Song of Songs 6:8-9

Jesus Christ sees you as flawless now, not tomorrow, not after you lose weight or allow your feet to heal or straighten your teeth or apply your makeup. Right this moment, as He looks at you, He sees beauty beyond compare, one that stands apart as a lily among thorns, a beauty that He delights in calling His own.

Now, if only we allowed ourselves to believe this!

Three challenges today, I think.

First one is the same as always. My beautiful friend, name another physical trait that is beautiful. Allow God to lead you, to inspire you, and you will see that it is not that difficult. I always feel a moment of panic before writing now. What trait, God? I ask Him. I think about it and then I feel His subtle guidance to the one He wants me to accept as beautiful. As much as I want to leap forward and say that my belly is beautiful, I am not there yet, no matter how I feel inside right now. It’s all about where my Beloved leads me. I’m delighting in the journey.

Second one is to decide that you will not allow yourself to be lied to about how God sees you. It is time to hold to the truth. He chose you, chooses you, seeks, protects, covers, blesses, loves, adores you. The King of all kings is WILD for you. You are His flawless dove, His perfect one. Rest in this assurance.

Third one is inner-beauty. What is inner-beauty? What do you think defines this shelter women run to because they feel ugly outside? And what makes one lack inner-beauty? What traits define inner-beauty and what traits define inner-ugliness?

Day Eight

I keep thinking about all that God is doing in my life throughout the course of this journey. It is almost hard to believe that we are only on day eight, give or take a day or two missed along the way. How far I’ve come in so short of a time is almost staggering. As I press forward, I feel the great anticipation of change, growth, and renewal.

I talked it over with my mom today and I told her how amazing this journey was going to be if we completely let God do all that He wants to do. It takes a great deal of trust and surrender to truly take this journey. The reason that you have to trust is because this journey leaves behind the wilderness full of lies that we’ve traveled through our whole lives and takes us into a land of beauty, freedom, and abundant life.

I think now is the time for us to really evaluate if we are allowing the voice of our Beloved to remove the lies of the enemy. Whose voice are you really listening to? If you’re finding it hard to see the prospect of your true beauty, it may be that you aren’t listening to what God desires for you to hear.

It was easy to pick the first couple of traits that we feel are beautiful on us. Once you get past those, however, it starts to become extremely difficult. God leads me to the next trait to be seen as beautiful and I can feel His delight and excitement about where He is taking me. He is setting me free from all the lies about my beauty, inside and out. As He has promised me this, I feel anticipation as well. Even as I think about the fact that I’m going to see all of me as beautiful, something I wouldn’t have believed possible a few weeks ago.

I thought about what my next trait would be for day eight. I have to say that my skin is beautiful. It has become softer and smoother. One day, I purchased a book about makeup. As I looked at the before and after photos of the women in the book, I was amazed at the difference. It made me want to rush out to the store and buy all the things they used, including foundation and concealer, in order to acheive the transformation I had seen on the glossy pages. As I looked at the cost of makeup, I decided to take the first step they had suggested. I purchased facial cleanser and toner. I began washing my face twice a day.

God showed me something amazing. How often I had looked in the mirror, noticed my beauty, and given makeup the credit. I would say something like, “My makeup looks really good today.”

God revealed to me how we are so willing to assume makeup makes us beautiful when it actually only enhances the natural beauty we have. It brings our beauty into focus. That’s all. The makeup doesn’t create our beauty, it highlights it.

Let me see how lovely you are. Song of Songs 2:14b

Today has two challenges. The first is the one that repeats itself. Choose another beautiful physical trait about yourself.

The second challenge is to sit down with Jesus and talk with Him. Let Him tell you why you’re beautiful to Him. He will tell you, I promise you, and you’re entire outlook will change. Tell Him that you truly want to discover your beauty, to see yourself how He sees you, and genuinely allow Him to speak to you. It won’t help us to list traits just to list traits, or to give up later because we can’t see anymore beauty. The only way to make it through this journey is to allow God full access to all of you and to truly believe what He calls beautiful to be truly beautiful.

Contact me if you need to talk. I’m willing to hear you out and share your journey.

Day Seven

When I thought about the fact that there were going to be 26 different physical traits (at a minimum) that would be listed, I told God how hard that was going to be. Were there even 26 physical traits that could be listed? And, what did He say in response? He said that He was going to bring me to a place where I would know all of me is truly beautiful. In that moment, I envisioned me thinking that my stomach was beautiful and though I laughed, I wasn’t disgusted by it or completely disbelieving that it could actually come to pass. This leads me to believe that as long as we stay the course on this journey of true beauty, God is truly and completely going to remove all the fallacies we’ve believed for so long.

You are a princess, and your feet are graceful in their sandals… Song of Songs 7:1a

My fourth trait is my feet. It is only fairly recent that I can look at my feet as things of beauty. For the longest time, my heels were cracked, split, and covered with dead skin, peeling off. That just sounds really gross. And it was. The problem was, I really enjoyed wearing sandals. And so, I was left with horrid feet and shame.

There came a time when I spoke to my friend and she asked me what soap I used to wash my feet. It was then that it occurred to me that I needed to wash my feet. Originally, I would just assume that being in the shower was enough for my feet to be clean. It was then that I decided that I was going to purposefully wash my feet every day.

It was only a week of washing my feet when my world came to a sudden fork in the road. In our Monday evening Bible study, we drew papers, half with a black dot, half without. We had just read about Jesus washing the deciples feet. We knew what was coming, we just didn’t know how it was all going to play out. There were a few women in our group that hated feet and a few of us that didn’t care either way, and then there was me.

As God had it work out, my feet were to be washed by one of the women that didn’t like to touch feet. We weren’t allowed to talk to each other or anything, we just had to sit there and allow our feet to be washed. So, with the lights dim and piano music playing softly from a cd, I sat there and felt horribly uncomfortable. When it came to the place where my heels were being lovingly caressed by this woman who hated feet washed them so tenderly, I began to weep. I’m sorry, I said to myself as I wept silently, I’m so sorry that my heels are healed. I had just begun to wash my feet, after all, and I wondered why God would make it happen so soon after I began to care for my feet.

“Why do you feel that you have to be perfect, inside and out?” He asked me as I cried.

I realized then that the reason He didn’t delay the washing was because He needed me to see that I am not lessened by my flaws. My tattered feet were not a horrible thing, they were a thing of beauty that needed tender care to become all that they were meant to become. And, until they were healed, they were still worthy of attention and care.

How often do we consider our flaws to be something that removes our worth and beauty? As I draw nearer to the place where God is bringing me, I feel a tangible excitement. All that has weighed down my worship and life is being lifted and tonight I have discovered a whole new truth. We are not defined by our ‘flaws’. We are still His, still beautiful, more beautiful than we can even understand or imagine. Today is the day to begin to let our ‘flaws’ melt away under His tender attention and care, love and revelation. It is time to let the scales fall from our eyes and see ourselves and others with the eyes of God.

The challenge is the same as it has been. Name another physical trait about yourself that you now see as beautiful. Soon, very soon, we will begin to see ourselves in completely different ways. I’m so very excited and delighted! Thank you for sharing this journey with me.

Day Six

Everyone who came by to see her exclaimed and admired her – All the fathers and mothers, the neighbors and friends, blessed and praised her: “Has anyone ever seen anything like this – dawn-fresh, moon-lovely, sun-radiant, ravishing as the night sky with its galaxies of stars?” Song of Songs 6:9b-10

I was thinking today about this journey and what we should be acheiving with this. As I mentioned yesterday, this isn’t about vanity. This isn’t about deciding that we are beautiful and everyone else is not. This isn’t about becoming haughty. This is about seeing our beauty and the beauty of others and banishing the lies of the world and the enemy.

Today I was thinking about compliments. Yesterday, I wrote two of the verses from Song of Songs that were spoken by the friends of the woman. They refer to the Shulamite as “most beautiful of women”. This shows the importance of friends acknowledging the beauty of each other.

As we progress forward, take the time to notice the beauty around you. It is apparent and easy to see, most times easier than seeing our own. Sometimes, we allow this to reinforce our feelings of inadequacy and ugliness. “I’m not as pretty as she is,” we think. Or, “I’m not as thin/shapely/toned as she is,” we murmur. This is something we spend our lives doing, comparing ourselves to other women.

We are not called to be other women. We are called to be ourselves. We are made unique because that is how God wanted us made. He didn’t want seven thousand Catherine Zeta-Jones’ running around. He wants the women He created to be the women He created, full of joy and delight in what He delights in.

Colossians 1:16b says, “All things were created by God’s Son, and everything was made for Him.”

We were made by Jesus and for Jesus. He made us for a purpose. That purpose is to be loved by Him and to love Him, to be known by Him and to know Him. You, lovely woman, are not here accidentally. You were created for a purpose, you were created to be loved by our wonderful Prince, you were created to be loved by friends and family, you were created beautifully by the Creator of all things. We are fearfully and wonderfully made!

My third trait of beauty is my hair. I find it funny that I received comments about that being other women’s trait of choice already. I gave it some thought today and I kept returning to my hair.

I will not hold myself to the standards of advertising. All magazine photographs are doctored to make the hair look shiny and full, wavy and beautiful. Their real hair is not like that. I doubt anyone’s hair is truly like that. But my hair is wonderfully thick and soft, even using Suave products.

The Shulamite is no exception to beautiful hair. More than once, the prince refers to her hair as a flock of goats winding their way down the side of Mount Gilead (4:1b, 6:5b). The goats he’s referring to had long, silky black hair that was shiny and when they made their way down the mountainside, it was like a cascading waterfall. And, as our Beloved so elegantly puts it, “your hair is so lovely it holds a king prisoner.” Song of Songs 7:5b

Hair is wonderful. There’s so much you can do with it. You can let it grow long…you can cut it short…you can change its hue…you can curl it…straighten it…pin it up…or let it cascade like a waterfall about your shoulders. I feel that God has blessed us with beautiful hair and it’s time for us to acknowledge its beauty. It has been my experience that most women with straight hair want curly hair, thin hair want straight hair, long want short, and all the reverses are true as well. Now, rather than see what our hair is not, let’s see what it is.

There will be two challenges today. The first is to name yet another of your physical traits that you believe is beautiful.

The second challenge is to think about your beautiful female friends. Take some time to really and truly comtemplate their beauty. And then, tell them. You don’t have to comment here or blog about it or email me but you do need to take the time to pull them aside and tell them, earnestly tell them, how beautiful they are.