S.Robinson

Society has a warped view of beauty. We judge one anothers’ value by our physical beauty. Women perm, paint, peel, frost, and dye, to please the secular world. The media bombards us with images of the ideal woman, captioned “you can look like this in ten easy steps!” I’ve tried the steps and I still don’t look like them!

I had always heard that “beauty was in the eyes of the beholder” and make-up changes their point of view! My mother said beauty was only skin deep, but ugly lived in the heart. Her idea was to let me know that there is more to beauty than the outward appearance.

What would this world come to if we all had the same view of what beauty is? Competition and jealousy would disappear along with the need for beauty contests. Beauty aides would disappear from store shelves. Fortunes are made because we scurry to the nearest department store for: polish, perfume, lotions, hair spray, foundation and the famous brush rollers, which I must say kept me awake at night. These things are wonderful and they do seem to improve our overall appearance but somewhere along the beauty line it stopped being about us and became an obsession. We have rituals which make us feel more acceptable to man but more distant from ourselves. People are beautiful, people of all shapes and sizes. Tall people, small people, large people, all people are beautiful

Medical experts have testified to the dangers involved with being obese, as well as how difficult the excess weight is to lose. These statements come as no surprise to those who suffer from obesity. The obese come face to face with these challenges daily, along with the self-hatred and depression that comes with it. Few of the obese have come to accept them selves as they are. The secular media promotes the worlds-eye view of beauty leaving us feeling as if we were just plain wrappers with little to value inside.
When we measure ourselves by the blue-eyed, blond model on the cover of Vogue, we are setting ourselves up for a fall. No two women look-alike and beauty comes in so many different packages. While we polish, pluck and rearrange the outside we can’t forget that who we are on the inside is as much a choice as the dress we choose to wear. We should labor to make our Spiritual man as beautiful as the outside. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We have it backwards. Outward beauty is much less important, than the beauty that comes from the heart. For women: make-up and frilly clothes makes us feel desirable. For men it may take something else entirely, but all of us change our appearance to change the way we feel. We have been programmed to believe that we are unacceptable in our original state. Our self-image is distorted by the information absorbed through magazines, TV, family, and every other form of secular media.

We are always looking for some new lotion, weight lose book or make-up that will enhance our natural beauty and perhaps even slow the aging process. We spend millions of dollars on diet pills, fat reducing herbs and vitamins to transform ourselves into the image the world has portrayed as beautiful.

Plastic surgeons make thousands of dollars on patients who believe they are less than perfect. The obese run to doctors to have surgery for weight lose. We are a desperate people, desperately looking for a chance to be someone else! We do everything we can to be different, or to be shaped different.

The change we need can’t be found in a bottle or a tube. The surgeons’ scalpel can never cut deep enough to find the peace of mind we’re looking for. We have been invaded by “the spiritual body snatchers.” Remember that old movie where aliens would leave pods lying around, and who ever was closest to the pod was stolen and a lifeless drone was left in their place. True beauty is not derived from the kind of clothes we wear or where we purchased them. True beauty comes from the heart where Jesus Christ has made His home. When we look into a mirror, do we see true beauty or artificial coverings.