Beauty Is What We Can't Have?

Last night at Downpour (our Bible Study) we started going through the Beatitudes and we somehow came on the topic of food. How we are not poor at all in our society, how we have way too much food, how the many people in other parts of the world view America as fat.

And for some reason it got me thinking. Three hundred years ago, look at the art. Almost all women were painted to be overweight. Not crazy obese, but by today's standards they would be overweight. And there was a reason. It was rare. This was a time when a majority of people were poor and hungry, everyone was thin. If you were overweight, that meant you were rich. You were special. So overweight became associated with beauty, it was something to be aspired to.

Then everything changed. Now, here in America at least. We have too much food. How many starving people do you think we could feed with the food that is thrown away by restaurants each night? (If only there was a way to preserve it and get it on a plane). We have so much food that according to our newspaper 4 out of 10 children in our schools is overweight. So it's actually harder to say no to food, and even harder to eat proper foods. That makes being thin hard, which then makes being thin the new goal.

Here's a whole new idea. Why don't we go for something even harder to find?

I Peter 3:3-5a ~ Don’t be concerned about the outward beauty of fancy hairstyles, expensive jewelry, or beautiful clothes. You should clothe yourselves instead with the beauty that comes from within, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is so precious to God. This is how the holy women of old made themselves beautiful. (NLT)

Imagine how "beautiful" our society would be if we worked hard to make our inner person beautiful? What if we worked as hard as we work to make our outside beautiful? But then again, no paparazzi is going to chase you down to get a picture of your inner beauty and sell it on the Internet for thousands of dollars, so what's the point right? (and for everyone who's thinking that's wrong, how many pictures of celebrities do you see in a day through magazine, TV, Internet, etc.?)

Let's aim for something that's hard to have, inner beauty.

T