Fiercehearted, Live Fully, Love BravelyНамуна

Four: Seeing Differently 

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

(Psalm 139:13-14)

Maybe we have defined beauty all wrong. Because I have known many artists, and when a piece has what it needs to fulfill their vision for it, they stand back and say, “Beautiful.” And it doesn’t matter a bit to them if anyone else agrees. The artist gets the final word. 

We are works of art who can say to God, “You knit me together in my mother’s womb” (Ps. 139:13). 

And perhaps if we had been witnesses of our own creation, we might have seen that what we think should have been left out is actually the crowning touch. “Ah yes, the freckles,” God could have said with a smile. Or whatever you question about your shape and form. 

If that is so, then I want to see differently. Not with the eyes of the beer commercials and the touched-up lingerie photos and the stilettos on runways. I want to look at who I am, at all of me, and glimpse every cell and strand as a wonder and mystery, as part of God’s infinite, incomprehensible doing. 

I want to do that now and also later when the years dim my eyes. When I can hardly make out the shape of my wrinkled face in the mirror, when I pinch those cheeks with trembling hands as I still say it to myself and all my sisters: 

I am beautiful.

You are beautiful.

We are beautiful.

This has always been true; we just didn’t always know it.