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I took gypsy4evermore  's advice from her blog entry: "Invalid Entry"  and started to read "Captivating" by John and Stasi Eldridge. I expected to learn a few things, even be touched by it at times. But not like this. More than once I wanted to hurl the book across the room. Not because it is a terrible book, but because it digs deep into a dark place in my heart I would rather continue to ignore. The premise is all women are beautiful, but because the enemy (Satan) hates all beauty, he will do whatever he can to destroy it, or at least make us believe it’s been destroyed, or we never had it to begin with. In many women (if not all) he succeeded, beginning his attacks as we’re but little girls and without any defense. The end result is still the longing to be beautiful, but without the knowing we are beautiful, and will always be beautiful no matter what people and society say, or what age does to our bodies. We react to this longing in many ways, including giving up on the possibility, doing whatever we can, no matter how emotionally or physically painful to meet today’s standards of beauty, or even hiding our beauty because it’s somehow dangerous. I fall in the latter category. Sort of. I don’t want to be beautiful. I don’t necessarily believe it’s dangerous, but I grew up believing it’s irrelevant. My parents never fawned over my looks, quite the opposite. Oh, they never told me I was ugly or plain, but their focus was always on what I did with my mind, such as my grades in school. As a consequence, I despised when people commented on any form of my beauty, whether it be physical, mental, or emotional. I saw it as missing the core of who I am - my intelligence. My brain and what I could do with it mattered most. See how I’m missing something here, as if intelligence can’t be beautiful also? Talking about a different subject, a friend of mine said how she was afraid of showing off some of her stories because of what other people would think. I wrote back saying God doesn’t look to other people’s opinions about us to discover whether or not our heart is in the right place. He can look for himself. The same goes for a woman’s beauty. Women are the denouement, the high point of the end of the act of creation before God rested. Call it, “saving the best for last”. Every woman born, because she’s a woman, carries all the beauty God gave Eve. On page 120, these words grabbed me: Reading George MacDonald several years ago, I came across an astounding thought. You probably heard that there is in every human heart a place that God alone can fill. (Lord knows we’ve tried to fill it with everything else, to our utter dismay.) But what the old poet was saying was that there is also in God’s heart a place that you alone can fill. “It follows that there is also a chamber in God himself, into which none can enter but the one, the individual.” You. You are meant to fill a place in the heart of God no one and nothing else can fill. Whoa. He longs for you I admit with my relationship with God, though I long to always draw nearer, I keep him at a distance. When I feel God’s own longing to draw me near, I try to distract his attention to others needing to know his love and his longing for them more than me. I’m content to stick to the shadows and watch God work his miracles, and shower his love on them. I don’t like to be the center of attention, least of all God’s. Perhaps it’s a sense of unworthiness, though I’m not as yet certain. I guess I feel God is so far above me and so immense I can’t understand how I can be so important to him he’d pursue me like a lover for his missing beloved. All women need to know we’re beautiful. That’s how we’re made. It’s not shallow to want it, to be told once in a while that we are indeed, beautiful and lovely. God also wants to tell us, and show us, how beautiful we are. All we have to do is ask. I have to share something windac wrote (I hope she doesn’t mind) in "Sharing Your Faith" (one of the God’s Way Group items): For those of you not female, or of the age of menopause, this might not mean anything to you, but it certainly meant a lot to me.When you pass the age of the beauty and exuberance of youth - wrinkles, grey hair, cellulite, extra weight gain, loss of estrogen, etc - it can be demoralizing to say the least. You enter a stage of life when you know with complete certainty that you could walk into a room full of men and not one would give you a second glance. That sounds shallow, to be sure, but it's demoralizing just the same. Anyway, I'd gone around in a funk of depression for months. I felt ugly, fat, unloved, unwanted, and anything but female. Then I had a dream like none other I've ever had. I was in a cavernous, dark area full of catacombs with lots of people in each one. They were dressed in robe-like garments, I'm assuming much like that of Biblical times. I was being led by a man of Middle Eastern descent (who, by the way, was extremely handsome). I was completely enveloped by his arms, but there was nothing sexual about it at all. Not a word was spoken during the entire encounter, but never had I felt so beautiful or loved! Upon waking, I wanted nothing more than to return to that place of peace and love. My entire outlook changed with that dream. |
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