Can I Not Be Beautiful?
I am not one to really listen to Christian music. I remember getting Brio back when I was a teenager and they had a list of contemporary mainstream artists with their Christian soundalikes. The only time I had much exposure to Christian music was when I attended Word of Life Bible Institute – and even there it was whatever they condoned as “good enough” Christian music.
Now that I am an adult and more aware of the outcomes of caring (or not) for my body and mind, I am trying to be a little more conscious about what I am musically digesting. I was listening through a playlist on Spotify titled "COOL CHRISTIAN GIRLS" when I came across Bethany DIllon’s song “Beautiful”. It was one of those rare tracks where a Christian artists seemed to be raw honest look at their human thoughts and struggles.
Notably, the chorus:
“I want to be beautiful/Make you stand in awe/Look inside my heart/And be amazed/I want to hear you say/Who I am is quite enough/Just want to be worthy of love/And beautiful.”
- "Beautiful", Bethany Dillon, Bethany Dillon 2004
The Assault on the Jewel
I think we often go overboard in the Church by shaming women into believing that they should not fee the desire to be admired for their beauty. That being beautiful, according to the checklist of Proverbs 31, is not something to be desired by the good Christian housewife. She should instead desire to be admired for her ability to be a brute force of Christian character.
The last time I read through this list, it seemed to me that outward beauty wasn’t something to be coveted, because looks are fleeting and charm fades. But that does not mean that we don’t want to be seen and we don’t want to attract attention based on our beauty. Or that beauty in a woman merely refers to what she looks like on the outside divorced from character on the inside (could beauty not be a combination of the two?).
I believe that God made women to be beautiful, and some of their desire is to be attractive. If He did not want our physical beauty to be some of what defines us, He would have made us much more akin to our brothers in Christ – with harder angles, coarser hair, and beards. Instead, He made us to be soft, rounder, more gentle. It is not strange as a woman to find another woman striking or beautiful in a platonic way. We were made to catch and hold attention as part of an outer beauty.
Adam could not find an animal that could hold his attention or could serve as a helpmate, so God specifically designed woman to be the crowning jewel of His creation:
“The man gave names to all the livestock, to the birds of the sky, and to every wild animal; but for the man no helper was found corresponding to him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to come over the man, and he slept. God took one of his ribs and closed the flesh at that place. 22 Then the Lord God made the rib he had taken from the man into a woman and brought her to the man. And the man said:
This one, at last, is bone of my bone
and flesh of my flesh;
this one will be called “woman,”
for she was taken from man.”
Genesis 2:20-22
Eve captured Adam’s attention and admiration the moment he saw her. It was part of the reason he knew he was formed for him. Combined with the attention she demanded by how she looked, he admired her immediately for the purpose that God made her for even before she could “prove it”. He admired her for the total sum of her beauty.
In the beginning, God created woman as the gem in the crown of humanity, the piece that brings beauty and the longing to admire just because of what it is. Not because of what it does.
The attack on women over the course of humanity has continued to prove that each of us, in our own understanding of what that entails, desires to be admired as beautiful.
We want to attract attention and hold it. We want a man to stop in his tracks and seek us out. And we call this romance. This idea that a man would do all that he could to then try to attract and hold our attention because of his admiration for us.
It is sad to see how the enemy has warped and attacked this desire. Whether it is by encouraging women to dress immodestly to try to get any male’s attention. Or preying on men by holding them captive with lust, as they throw away their attention and time to any and all women, real or fake, that promise the allure of a beautiful body and what she can do for him.
Our beauty was not meant to be exploited or neglected. Unfortunately, as the enemy continues to disarm the warriors of God’s kingdom, he uses the very gift that was meant to make us the crown of God’s creation to bind them and undermine us
That does not mean that when our husbands, brothers, coworkers, or friends are caught in the web of lust and sexual immorality we have no way to fight back. We have one Greater Who fights for us– and He always wins.
Our First Love designed us specifically and specially; He wages terrible war against the enemy that tries to mar His design. If only we would let Him.
Am I One to be Admired?
I am in my second year of trying to read the bible all the way through. I have found the discipline to be a way that God can speak to me more readily when I am wrestling with Him and seeking answers.
Lately, the questioning has been regarding my response to sexual immorality in the Church and within people who claim to be men of God but have made choices that allow them to stray so far. How can these men so quickly pursue the opposite of what God intended? And does God even care?
How do we, as women of God, even begin to navigate this reality? Can I truly be admired by my husband and all he surrounds himself with? In a world where men in our society are onslaught by airbrushed nude women from magazines to tv screens to the internet, it can be hard to feel that we are worth being looked at. The beauty of womanhood has been, and continues to be, assaulted
Who, then, can admire us in the midst of all this carnage?
Last year, the following verse leapt of the page and into my heart, where it planted and began to grow with thoughts and ponderings:
The Lord your God is among you, a warrior who saves. He will rejoice over you with gladness. He will be quiet in his love. He will delight in you with singing.”
Zephaniah 3:17
God sees us, the lovely creations He has tenderly made, and He sings over us. When it seems that the world has forgotten us because we are not their standard of sexy or beauty, God knows us to be so much more lovely.
I yearn to be seen. But even more so, I yearn to be saved, I yearn to be loved and to be known. I yearn to be called delightful and special, to be considered the gem. These are echoes of Eden that my heart longs for.
Zephaniah reminds the modern believer that God still fills those longings to be seen, to be known, to be admired even today. He believes each of us to be beautiful, uniquely and exquisitely made.
This is where the opening of this verse is so important. Our Lord is not a god who sits idly by and sings little cute songs over you. No, first and foremost our God is angered by the assault on His most precious creation. While He allows His people their own free will to do and to act as they choose, He does not take away consequences for our choices.
Consequences of Admiring Adultery
One of the most common sins throughout the Old Testament were those of sexual sins, because they hit us to our core. Pure Sexuality is what best represents the communion of the Holy Ghost with us as we bear to Him our nakedness, our humanity, and the most gentle parts of our being (physically, spiritually, and emotionally). What a field day the devil has with corrupting sexuality in the church. And because the church is more silent than the world on what we should be esteeming and acknowledging as God’s gift and treasure, our enemy continues to pluck up men (and increasingly, women) with unprepared hearts and minds. Wisdom in Proverbs warned about the temptress in the backstreets and far too many of the men in our congregations seem to use these unwise paths as their highways.
Unfortunately, this means that many men are also falling victim to the consequences of pursuing the adulterous woman instead of seeking purity to save their hearts and admiration for the women of wisdom. We end up losing out on the pureness of their admiration because of foolhardy choices. Because the community of believers is not equipping these young men with their smartphones and their social media, to really understand what the road to foolishness is– or how to stop oneself when found there.
And this neglect to help our brother further damages the Kingdom.
Looking back in the Bible, those who ended up chasing temporary beauty lost the gift the Creator uniquely gave them – strength. Whether that was physical strength, in the case of Sampson who lost his strength and his sight after chasing yet again another prostitute who had more to offer in looks than in valor. Or Kings David and Solomon, whose wandering hearts and eyes led them to losing the strength of leadership and a kingdom.
We should be encouraging and equipping our brothers with the weapons to pursue sexual integrity in the Church. To help them pursue and admire their First Love to grow their strength, Otherwise, they end up fighting against their Creator as they add to the assault on their sisters.
Enough to Be Admired
The Lord is fighting for us women in His care as our beauty and our grace has been weaponized against us and we have been pitted by the enemy against false charm and attraction. He sees us when we are falling apart in front of the mirror because of what a cruel male (or even female) in our life has said in regards to how attractive we are. He sees when we are struggling because we have had someone or something that seems more beautiful selected over us. He sees this and He comes to our aid and our rescue.
And in that rescue, there comes rejoicing. When it feels that we are never enough in the eyes of the world, when we are falling short in what we have been made to be, God is singing over us.
I have seen backlash to the idea that we are enough in Christ from some bible believing Conservatives I follow. We can acknowledge that without Christ we are not perfected, or made complete as the original word meant. But for the love of all that is Holy – women have been lied to since the snake in the garden that they are not enough. Must we add one more hurdle which makes most women pursuing Christ feel as if they are not worthy of admiration?
That was what the serpent tempted Eve with. Was she sure that she was all that was made to be in that place? Was there not more she could add to herself to make her a little bit better?
Sadly, Eve’s pride and belief that maybe her presence in God’s Eden was not enough led her to try to add to what she was. It’s a very tricky place of pride for the female brain. That perhaps we have not been made enough by God; we are not pleasing enough or lovely enough or gentle. And so we continue to reach out to add and to add.
Eve could have realized that she was enough at that moment. She could have turned to her Creator, who was available in the Garden, and see that He had made her to be all that she needed to be. But she chose not to.
As modern day women of God, we should not make the same mistake. We should not be afraid to go to God. We should not think we will be shamed by Himfor we lack. Instead, we should find encouragement that He can heal where we are weak, perfecting us with a kindness that cruelty of the fallen world and those in it are not able to provide.
And in those moments of making us whole, He will quiet us. We no longer will need to fight, afraid that we need to prove ourselves and what we are capable of doing. As He fights for the Jewel of His Creation, He will soothe our hearts He has created as lovely and capable and admirable because He has not created us accidentally.
Apart from Him, the worries of the world will creep back in. The sinfulness of fallen man will remind us that it is not safe around us, that we need to always be on our guard. Ready to protect and defend ourselves against the onslaught. We will seek approval in ways that are destructive because they seem to be the only way for us to find some semblance of peace.
Instead, we should run to our First Love who wishes to comfort us in the ways that our earthly loves cannot do so. Fight for us in ways that our human husbands fail. And bring us peace in only the way that His Spirit can provide us peace.
He will quiet our souls and then He will sing over us. The song our hearts long to hear. The one about how we are complete and beautiful and worth chasing after. How we are loved with a love that will never back away, will never shy in the face of the moments that make us look ugly or harsh, that will return to us time and again.
No love song on earth can compare to the lyrics that the Lord composes for your soul. He knows what you are longing for, where you are in need of encouragement, what ignites your fear and what brings you comfort.
The best part of all of this – you don’t need to communicate any of this to Him. You don’t need to tell Him what your expectations are. You don’t need Him to learn your “tells", or how to speak when you are engaging unresolved trauma. He knows instantly, immediately, and intuitively because He has made you, He knows you, and He studies you.
He praises you even when it does not feel like you have earned that praise. Nothing in His Kingdom is earned. It is given. Like grace, He rejoices over you because He has made you and He loves you. There is no need to earn or to prove or to compare.
Now, this is not a concept that is going to immediately quiet all of your fears and all of your doubts. Remember, the glass we look through is dim and it is cloudy and there are going to be days where the song of your First Love and his approval of you is going to be distant.
In those moments, you must respond like the Young Maiden in the Song of Solomon and you must chase Him. You must find where your First Love has gone so that you can hear Him singing over you again. You can hear how He admires the way you have been designed and the gifts you bring.
Unlike your earthly husband, who has his own traumas and baggage to unpack, your Heavenly Husband can attend to your needs instantly. It may not be in the ways that you always expect, but the way your God can delight your heart will be so much richer.
Perhaps He will bring you a field of flowers after a long day. Or the perfect song on your playlist when you’re feeling a little distraught. Perhaps He will provide you with the peace to take a nap. Or send along a friend who can fill that need for companionship and conversation in the moment.
In the moments where we are desperately looking to be admired, let us remember that God has admired us first and that He has made us desirable and lovely and enough in Him. Nothing that the devil can make to try to compare to us can succeed in being more lovely or inspiring.
We can also respond with grace to our husbands and fathers and brothers and friends who the world and its master has stolen away with false beauty and pretense. We can respond to them with God’s approval and grace and love. We can speak back to our fallen warriors and leaders the strength that comes from God and can be returned to them despite wandering from the path.
This will not be easy. This will not come without challenge or resistance or pushback from the Enemy. You will need to respond as Graceful Warriors and continue to show up with God’s power enhancing your beauty, your charm, your grace, and your hope.
You will not be defeated because you are not looking for their approval. You already have earned it. It is being sung behind you as your theme song. Instead, you will be offering to your brothers the type of admiration they are looking for – the map to find the approval that God offers to them.
In the moments where we lead our husbands and our sons to the Father, that is when we will hear from their mouths the admiration of God. And the song from their lips will sound like the scratchy faint mimic of the song that your God is already whispering over you.