The Other Side Of Beauty: 7-Day Reading PlanSample

Every person wants to be valued and loved. Love is the most basic longing of the human heart. Your definition of love will shape your whole life. It will be the foundation of your understanding of God and your own self-worth; it will choose your spouse and your friends. It will be the reason you stand up for the underdog or become the bully. Let me ask you again: What is your definition of love? In  high school, it seemed to me that love was all about how others made me feel, and in my mind, there was a clear connection between how much affection I got from others and how I looked—so I equated the two. Beauty was my key to love. It would take a lightning-bolt moment and a whole new perspective on love and beauty, identity and worth, before I finally came to see the truth and started discovering what God had to say about all this.

Understanding the correct definition of love is not a cure-all, but it does give us a concrete, real, and truthful place to start. Once we know it, we can go back and examine if a person or relationship is in alignment with God’s definition of love for us. Without it, we flounder and can end up accepting the opposite of love (use) as the real thing.

Maybe you have never encountered imitation love, or maybe you found yourself somewhere in my story. No matter. Accepting and surrendering our lives to the God of love is transformative for all of us. When we do, we discover that love has a name, a face, and that is Christ Jesus. Jesus tells us, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12 ESV). In the end, nothing else will matter and nothing else will remain except love in its truest form. Loving ourselves and others as God commands opens us up to a life rooted in truth and makes a way to authentic beauty.