The Other Side Of Beauty: 7-Day Reading PlanSample

What does it say about our women, about our culture, if we’d rather look good than do good? So many young women today have swallowed the same lie I did about what beauty is. We look to the world for answers, for help, to be validated, to be told we are good, beautiful, and worthy. But instead, we develop a sense of inadequacy that we believe can only be cured by a product, a look, or a lifestyle. Is this you? It sure was me, and, to be honest, it’s still something I catch myself struggling with sometimes.

But here’s what I’ve learned along the way: when we allow our desires to be dictated by the beauty industry’s ideology, we begin to navigate our lives by their desires and their goals, which are primarily to entrap us into believing that we need them—we need to look like that, we need a guy like that, we need a loft/apartment/house like that, we need, we need, we need.

What we really need is a reality check. We need to be reminded, “The world doesn’t need what women have, it needs what women are.” These are the words of Edith Stein, a woman who lived through World War I and died in a Nazi concentration camp in World War II. A nurse, philosopher, and later nun, she saw firsthand the evil that bad ideologies can do to the world. To be a woman is to be more than our parts. It is to be more than the length of our lashes or the plumpness and color of our lips.

The more we define beauty as merely temporary, physical, and buyable, the more we fall into the trap and, worse yet, the more we neglect and abandon the beauty that really matters, the beauty that God values. Beauty in kindness, gratitude, forgiveness, in reaching out to and loving those who need help, who are lonely, who are forgotten.

Strange how something as simple as beauty can have such an impact on our lives, deeper than we might imagine. I was searching for beauty because I believed that beauty would save me. I believed that beauty just might give me everything I ever wanted.

I wasn’t wrong. But I was after the wrong kind of beauty.