Beauty

By Pastor John Adams

Hauser Community Church

Do we really believe we are worth so little?

Do we really believe a woman is worthy of love and attention only when she is pretty enough?

As a man, I doubt I can appreciate the pressure we place on women and girls to measure up to our impossible standards of beauty.  Yet, every hour of every day, we tell them, “If you just looked better, you would be more worthy of love and attention.”

How much is enough

Women of all ages hear and believe this message.  They are willing to make sacrifices, even great sacrifices, so that they can appear beautiful.  In the past year, women in the US spent 7 billion dollars on cosmetic supplies.  If those 7 billion dollars were a stack of $100 bills, it would be 4.2 miles tall!

I am definitely not arguing against the use of cosmetics, but I wonder, how much is enough?

Not only do the women among us spend significant sums on cosmetic products, many of them are purchasing cosmetic medical procedures.  These can be everything from surgeries that add or subtract to Botox injections.  In 2007, 11,700,000 of these elective procedures were done so that each of these women could look prettier.

As you know, medical procedures are expensive.  If you added the cost of just the 5 most popular of these procedures, and they are all surgical, women spent another 5 billion, 3 hundred million dollars to appear beautiful.

Pressure to look perfect

Our culture lifts up physical beauty as an idol and sacrifices our daughters to it.  Even our celebrities and our “super models” require digital editing in order to measure up to our impossible standards of beauty.  Our movies, our television programming and our advertisements, present bodies more beautiful than yours, and persuade our girls to do whatever it takes to measure up.

Even worse, we tell them that we will love them if – if they are thinner, or prettier, or had more curves, or less curves. What we fail to communicate is that we love them for who they are, no strings attached.  Often we simply forget to tell them.  When we do tell them we appreciate them for their heart and not just their appearance, we still fail to say it often enough.  A flood of false messages drowns our few words.

Did you realize that just thirty minutes of television viewing is enough to make a secure young girl feel inferior?  If she wakes up feeling good about herself, turning on the TV for just 30 minutes will ruin that feeling.  She will be told repeatedly that this or that product will make her more beautiful – and of course, she must be more beautiful.  Even without the advertising, every woman, every girl she sees on television is closer to our impossible goal of beauty than she is, and she can’t measure up.

With all the pressure to look perfect, it should not surprise us that 10 million women between the ages of 15 and 24 in the US have a true eating disorder, either Anorexia or Bulimia.  Of those women, as many as 2 million of them are likely to die because of complications of their obsession with beauty.  They will literally sacrifice their lives for beauty.  Many others will sacrifice their health and even their ability to bear children in a vain attempt to look perfect.

Even among those teen girls without a true eating disorder, over half of them use a dangerous form of weight reduction: skipping meals, fasting, smoking, vomiting, or the use of laxatives.  These young girls will grow to be adult women who also have an unhealthy relationship with food.

A recent university study found that more than 60% of adult women have some fixation on food.  From continual dieting, to binge eating, to obsessively counting every calorie consumed, 3 out of 5 women cannot just eat to live.

When our entire culture tells women that your appearance is what makes you worth loving, a few kind words will not erase the lie. We can start, however, by telling them the truth.

True and lasting beauty flows from the person you really are

We can agree with God when He says, “You are deeply loved. You are precious for who you are, not how you look.”  The truth is God loves each of us, regardless of our past, our appearance, or our attitude toward Him.  He loves us so much that He sent Jesus to die for us.  (Romans 5:8)

We can recognize the intense pressure every girl, every woman, feels to look “beautiful.”  We can encourage them by telling them that they are already beautiful and we can learn to look deeper than their skin.  True and lasting beauty flows from the person you really are, deep down, not just what your body looks like.

God urges women, “clothe yourselves with the beauty that comes from within, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is so precious to God.” (1 Peter 3:4)  True beauty, from the inside out, will endure and even improve with time, and through God’s kindness in Jesus Christ, will last forever.

You are precious to God.  He made you, body and soul, just to show you how much He loves you.  Don’t sacrifice your soul for the impossible goal of physical perfection.  God loves the real you and so do we.

Pastor John Adams has been Senior Pastor at Hauser since January 2004. He holds a Master of Divinity degree and  is married to Candy. They have two children.
Hauser Community Church is at 69411 Wildwood Rd. North Bend. Tel. 756-2591