Redefining Beauty

When I was a little girl I loved the color pink. I painted my finger nails, wore my mom’s high heals and played dress up. My favorite thing in the world was to wear a pretty dress and hear my dad tell me I looked beautiful. I believed him. Eventually I traded in my dolls for a baseball glove and my heals for sneakers and opted to play in the dirt with the boys but there was always a part of me that felt most free when I felt beautiful and feminine and when I didn’t have anyone to impress but the adoring eyes of my father.

Fast forward several years to a young woman in high school trying to figure out what it looks like to be a christian woman under the weight of the lies of our culture, learning the balance between what the church taught as “beauty” vs. “vanity”. I remember attending youth conferences and small groups where we were told to know our true worth and see our true beauty…in the next breath we would be told not to date or wear anything that would cause a man “to stumble”. We were told that the right man will fall in love with us because of the beauty of our heart and not solely because of our physical beauty. We were reminded of scriptures such as 1 Peter 3:3, “Your beauty should not come from outward adornment…but of your inner self…” All of those things are good and true and very necessary guideposts but they only give us one side of the story. We still have this natural, very nagging desire in us to be acknowledged as beautiful…and not just beautiful inside but physically beautiful.

Beauty is Relative

So what is beauty? The dictionary tells us that it is “a combination of qualities that pleases the aesthetic senses, particularly the sight.” We turn to our culture and media and we’re taught that to be beautiful is to be stick skinny with big breasts, abs, perfect hair and perfect teeth. We look to history and find that women have both mauled and manipulated pretty much every part of their bodies – lips, eyes, waists, foreheads, stomachs, breasts and feet – that did not fit into the cookie-cutter ideal of a particular era’s ideal of beauty and perfection. What this shows us is that beauty is relative. No definition can define it. No one set of eyes can see, determine and make the final say. No descriptors can put it in a box. Just as the old sang goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The only reason so many women throughout the ages so readily manipulated their bodies and nearly killed themselves to achieve “beauty” is because they allowed their perception of themselves and their idea of “beauty” to be defined by their culture. We teach women that beauty is a concept of black and white and that the black and white is exactly what culture says it is.

Scriptural Beauty

If however we look to scripture for our definition we see that beauty is not black and white. God never uses a set of physical characteristics to exclusively define beauty. There are instances where physical beauty is acknowledged. For example, all throughout Song of Songs and also in the story of Leah and Rachel in Genesis 29:17 where it talks about Leah having weak eyes but her sister Rachel having a lovely figure and being “beautiful”. Outward beauty is acknowledged but the emphasis is never put there. Instead we see the emphasis being put on internal qualities in passages such as 1 Samual 16:7, “Man looks at the outward appearance but God looks at the heart”. And perhaps the most well known passage 1 Peter 3:3, “Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as elaborate hairstyles and the wearing of gold jewelry or fine clothes. Rather, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit which is of great worth in God’s sight”. So we know what God prioritizes but does that mean He desires that we live the rest of our lives never acknowledging or understanding the place of our physical beauty and never seeing ourselves as beautiful? And if that’s the case how do we live day to day in a culture that screams the opposite to us?

I would argue instead that physical beauty has its place in our lives and I would go further to say that it is important to not only acknowledge its place but to invest in our physical beauty. Exactly because physical beauty and internal beauty are interconnected; not completely separate entities but rather the direct result of each other. The world and culture are good at prioritizing the external and trashing the internal. The church is good at prioritizing the internal and trashing the external. But they are made to work together. Inner beauty was made to cultivate external beauty and not visa versa. The minute that order gets reversed, it directly influences and distorts the inner beauty that we were made to possess. In fact if we are to look at the context of 1 Peter passage in scripture we exactly this. Peter is speaking to a group of women who were taking beauty and making an idol out of it. Peter is not forbidding the pursuit of outward beauty. He is only advising away from it when used in an extravagant manner to feed pride, vanity and encourage lavishness. He is pointing out that eternal things are of more importance.

Ultimate Beauty

In other terms, our problem is not that we pursue beauty too much but that we pursue it too little. There is a beauty that the world is not worthy of that is readily available to us at every moment. There is a beauty that trumps all other beauties. I’m reminded of one of my favorite C.S. Lewis quotes, “Like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased!” The reason women of our culture feel automatically insecure when we see beautiful women on the covers of the magazines is exactly because we are far to easily pleased. The reason we see the women on the big screen and wish we had their face or figure is exactly because we are far too easily pleased. It’s not a matter of achieving some standard of beauty but rather re-hauling our definition of beauty. It’s not a matter of losing another 10 pounds, putting on another layer of make-up or even altering our bodies and faces with plastic surgery. It’s about heart transformation which allows us to see with eyes that are not maimed by culture.

This is exactly where the place of physical beauty comes in. When I am confidant in my identity and validation in Christ…when I know I possess the most epic beauty that is known to man inside of me, I am no longer on a mission to have this world, culture, my friends or even my boyfriend validate my beauty. That doesn’t mean I never get dressed up, put on make-up or wear high heals. It simply means validation is not my reason for doing those things. In fact I’ve found it interesting that the more confidant I get as a women of God, the more I find that I want to express my femininity in those ways exactly because its an expression of the beauty that is already cultivated inside.

I look around at women in our culture who we label as beautiful primarily because they are sex-icons…Beyonce, Rihanna, Madonna, etc. Their beauty is based in the validation of a culture at one fading moment in history. It is based on the size of their breasts and the shapeliness of their hips. They prance around television and magazine covers as if they own the world. As women passionately pursuing Christ, we possess the most epic beauty known to man yet we allow culture to shove us quietly into a corner and make us feel insecure the minute we don’t meet their definition of beauty.  I long to see women in the church redefine cultures standard of beauty. I for one want to be a woman that possesses the unfading beauty that scripture speaks of. To be gentle yet strong, humble yet confident, pure of heart yet understanding the role of my beauty and sexuality, servant-hearted yet a leader, meek yet a warrior… To be a woman that this world is not worthy of (Hebrews 11:38).