Beautiful women?

What Is Beauty?

Since learning about the work of Mercy Ships, especially the surgery they carry out to help victims of facial deformities (often life-threatening or seriously stigmatising) I find it even more difficult to accept the media and society’s view of what, or who, is beautiful. It is distressing that unnecessary and extravagant surgery is carried out in the West, indeed even encouraged, to make people more beautiful, according to the standards of society’s celebrity status, while millions starve or are denied the most basic of medical care.

Who decides what makes a woman beautiful? Why should anyone be made to feel ugly or unacceptable? Society has a lot to answer for. Media celebrities are no more than false gods unless their ‘beauty’ is of an inner nature. If the body is truly the Temple of God, then it must be beautiful in His sight, for it houses the fruit of the Spirit… love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness and temperance. This quotation from Galatians, is surely THE definition of what makes any person beautiful.

 

Nature’s Sculpture – poem by Gladys Hobson:

Like a twisted log tossed on the beach

Each groove and knot forming nature’s sculpture.

If mind is open it can reach

A story true

Of life and death —

Crafted in lines bold and free

In hollows and grooves and swirls and knots:

A distorted body —

A soul tormented?

 

Or is the story nature tells

Far from what my eyes do see?

For beauty lies within the heart

And sings a different melody,

Those crafted grooves

That make me shudder

Were earned by life’s experience.

Each tells a story of its own

Yet builds into a perfect whole.

 

Again I look into the mirror

Unafraid of what I see;

For nature’s sculpture so defined

Is beauty of a different kind.

I am who I am —

Yes, this is me.