Just as there’s beauty and purpose in every season, there’s beauty and purpose for everything that comes to our lives, good or bad.
Source: Weathering the Whethers of Life
Photo Credit: The Four Seasons Free Stock Photo – Public Domain Picture
Beauty
(Not) Photoshopped
Confession: on multiple occasions I’ve been tempted to ask my tech-savvy husband to photoshop my pictures. And on a couple of occasions, I’ve almost followed through. Though my husband is expert in all things graphic design, I wouldn’t have been happy with the results save for the red-eye removal. I’d rather be real than photoshopped.
Still, I hate having my picture taken and only do it now to preserve memories for my children. My sister was always the photogenic one, with the perfect smile. It takes about a hundred shots for me to take a decent picture, and even then I only like the ones where my super-cute kids draw attention away from me.
Even now the only profile pictures I use consist of me and my kids. My preferred gravatar shows only my face, but if there were space to pan out you’d see that I’m holding my daughter. The day my husband took the picture, we’d gone to take some professional family photos with my in-laws. None of the professional pictures turned out, but the one my husband took is among the few photos I like of me because it captures a moment of genuine contentment and joy—not fake and forced as in a photo shoot.
Maybe my aversion to selfies is a result of pride, not wanting my flaws on permanent display in photo format. Or maybe I only like the ones with my kids because I’m most relaxed and real when with them. In those pictures, I’m laughing, joyful, genuine, not posed. They make me feel beautiful.
Yes, I’m content with how God made me. But I realize it’s who he’s made me that determines beauty. As the Bible says, beauty doesn’t come from external things, as the world would have us believe. It comes from the heart. My children make me feel beautiful because I know I’ve sacrificed for them, and would give my life for them if needed. They’ve seen me at my best and at my worst, and they love me still. They’ve seen me in my most real, most raw moments—unphotoshopped, and somehow find the beauty in it. And that’s how God sees me, too, because he looks beyond the surface and into my heart.
Photo Credit: Free stock photos of analog camera · Pexels
A Different Kind of Beautiful
The other morning my son woke me up by holding my face in his chubby little hands and whispering in my ear, “Mommy, you’re beeeeyoutiful. You’re my most beeeeyoutiful Mommy.” I was ready to give him the world if he so desired, when he went on to say, “Your hair is messy. It needs a brush. And so do your teeth.” Three-year olds. They can be heavenly sweet and brutally honest, and it only makes you love them all the more.
As we enjoyed some precious cuddle-time, I vaguely wondered if his latter comments about my messy hair and other maladies negated his initial compliment. And that’s when I realized. Children operate on a whole different standard of beauty.
We grow up in a world saturated with impossibly-perfect super model standards. Photoshopped, of course. The media convinces us we’re less-than-worthy if we don’t measure up to its definition of beauty. We can’t even pass through the check-out lane without a barrage of images staring us down, telling us we’re not enough. And all this right next to the 700-calorie candy bar display.
Yet in the midst of it all, my son sees his haphazard-haired Mommy-without-make-up and says, “you’re beeeeyoutiful.” It’s not that he ignores my imperfections. Instead, he sees me in all my imperfect glory and knows that beyond it all is a heart full of love for him.
Maybe that’s why the Bible says we should all be more like children. Not childish, of course, but childlike. They see from a higher perspective than we who tower over them in stature. I believe they see from God’s perspective…God, who “does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”
Photo Credit: Tiara | Flickr – Photo Sharing!
Embracing Change
If we can look beyond the moment of change to the ultimate outcome, we may more readily embrace it. Faith enables us to see change as a seed, piercing the ground and transforming the soil. Our response is to patiently wait, knowing the seed will transform into something beautiful in its time.
Source: Embracing Change
This Life & Beyond 
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