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https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Beautiful-Life/1653276218239668?fref=ts
Thursday, May 21, 2015
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
Prom and Power Outages
Learning to Live and Living Without
Weekends are always interesting in the mountains. Saturday, 2 May was my high school's prom, at which I learned two very valuable lessons: May can be just as cold as any other month, so sleeveless dresses are not always the wisest choice, and people in my generation have a tremendously skewed idea of beauty.
Alright, so I actually knew both of those. But the latter really hit hard over the course of the evening, and I really felt God compelling me to address it here. I was getting ready with a friend and heard her suddenly yell "ouch!" She'd glued her fake nail in the wrong place and pealing the glue off was apparently a rather uncomfortable experience. Ever a fount of unique and useful advice, I told her to stop because "hurting yourself is bad for you". "It takes some serious pain to be beautiful," she replied. And it made me think. How much are we sometimes willing to pay to have someone else label us "beautiful"? Is it worth it?
What really struck me as I thought about it was that an indescribable amount of pain has gone into making you who you are. If pain is the price for beauty, it has already been paid. Paid by a man who was 100% human and 100% God, who died in lonely agony to be able to call you His own, to make you in His image and make you beautiful. So all of the silly things we do, the fake nails and tanning salons, the makeup and hairspray and six-inch heels, are unnecessary pain. If God wanted you to be 5'10" and have curly hair and long nails, He would have made you that way. It's fun to dress up, of course-I wore makeup and a fancy dress and did my hair-but sometimes it's good to look at ourselves and wonder how far we're taking it. Can you feel beautiful without all those things? Because you should always know that you are. Can you live with yourself the way you are?
Speaking of May being cold, the weekend following prom was one of the strangest weekends of my life. My parents' anniversary is in May, so we intended for the weekend to be a nice relaxing weekend for them to celebrate. It was a much-deserved break, but unfortunately not as relaxing as they'd hoped it would be. Because it snowed. A lot. On Saturday, 9 May, we got almost a foot of snow up in the mountains where we live, which was certainly interesting. But it's all fun and games until the power goes out, which it did at about 7:30 Saturday night. And didn't come back.
Well, we fired up our wood-burning stove and kept the house plenty warm, and we had water still in our water tank so that wasn't too much of an issue, so my sisters and I lit up some candles and snuggled in to play some Mindtrap and wait. As we carried over into Sunday with still no power, we started to feel some side effects of the power outage. Like, not having enough water to shower or anything. We melted some snow in a skillet to wash our faces but that was about it. At which point the lesson was thoroughly impressed upon me that sometimes we just have to live without. Majorly live without. But God still gets us through and He still finds ways to remind us that there is beauty all around and within us no matter how strange or difficult the circumstances are.
Hoping it's warmed up to nice May temperatures everywhere else. Would love to hear your thoughts and/or experiences on the matter!
Weekends are always interesting in the mountains. Saturday, 2 May was my high school's prom, at which I learned two very valuable lessons: May can be just as cold as any other month, so sleeveless dresses are not always the wisest choice, and people in my generation have a tremendously skewed idea of beauty.
Alright, so I actually knew both of those. But the latter really hit hard over the course of the evening, and I really felt God compelling me to address it here. I was getting ready with a friend and heard her suddenly yell "ouch!" She'd glued her fake nail in the wrong place and pealing the glue off was apparently a rather uncomfortable experience. Ever a fount of unique and useful advice, I told her to stop because "hurting yourself is bad for you". "It takes some serious pain to be beautiful," she replied. And it made me think. How much are we sometimes willing to pay to have someone else label us "beautiful"? Is it worth it?
What really struck me as I thought about it was that an indescribable amount of pain has gone into making you who you are. If pain is the price for beauty, it has already been paid. Paid by a man who was 100% human and 100% God, who died in lonely agony to be able to call you His own, to make you in His image and make you beautiful. So all of the silly things we do, the fake nails and tanning salons, the makeup and hairspray and six-inch heels, are unnecessary pain. If God wanted you to be 5'10" and have curly hair and long nails, He would have made you that way. It's fun to dress up, of course-I wore makeup and a fancy dress and did my hair-but sometimes it's good to look at ourselves and wonder how far we're taking it. Can you feel beautiful without all those things? Because you should always know that you are. Can you live with yourself the way you are?
Speaking of May being cold, the weekend following prom was one of the strangest weekends of my life. My parents' anniversary is in May, so we intended for the weekend to be a nice relaxing weekend for them to celebrate. It was a much-deserved break, but unfortunately not as relaxing as they'd hoped it would be. Because it snowed. A lot. On Saturday, 9 May, we got almost a foot of snow up in the mountains where we live, which was certainly interesting. But it's all fun and games until the power goes out, which it did at about 7:30 Saturday night. And didn't come back.
Well, we fired up our wood-burning stove and kept the house plenty warm, and we had water still in our water tank so that wasn't too much of an issue, so my sisters and I lit up some candles and snuggled in to play some Mindtrap and wait. As we carried over into Sunday with still no power, we started to feel some side effects of the power outage. Like, not having enough water to shower or anything. We melted some snow in a skillet to wash our faces but that was about it. At which point the lesson was thoroughly impressed upon me that sometimes we just have to live without. Majorly live without. But God still gets us through and He still finds ways to remind us that there is beauty all around and within us no matter how strange or difficult the circumstances are.
Hoping it's warmed up to nice May temperatures everywhere else. Would love to hear your thoughts and/or experiences on the matter!
Friday, May 1, 2015
What the Mirror Tells You
I was at a service at my church doing prayer stations. I sat down at a table by myself and found myself facing a small hand mirror and the question: "Look at your face in a mirror. What do you see?"
Sometimes an honest answer hurts. I had to look at my face and admit to myself that I see a girl who spends too much time telling herself she isn't good enough and not enough time remembering that God made her in His image. I see a girl who spends too much time worrying about the insignificant difficulties of life and not enough time praising God for the eternity He's promised her. A girl who spends too much time wanting someone else to tell her that she's pretty but not enough time letting God show her that she's beautiful, a girl who could find every minuscule flaw in her complexion but doesn't remember that God chooses everything for a reason. When I look in a mirror, I see a girl who's trying hard to become the woman God created her to be but she's nervous and scared because she doesn't know how.
Look at your face in a mirror. What do you see? I know it isn't easy. Sometimes I think we avoid mirrors, just because we're afraid of what we'll see. Not just afraid that the outfit we were so excited about this morning doesn't look as nice as we thought it would. Afraid that the person we see in the mirror isn't the person we're supposed to be. We have to remember that the only thing we're ever "supposed to be" is what God has created us to be, and there is nothing that can ever derail God's plans. He will make everything beautiful in its time, so we don't ever need to be afraid of what the mirror is telling us.
Sometimes an honest answer hurts. I had to look at my face and admit to myself that I see a girl who spends too much time telling herself she isn't good enough and not enough time remembering that God made her in His image. I see a girl who spends too much time worrying about the insignificant difficulties of life and not enough time praising God for the eternity He's promised her. A girl who spends too much time wanting someone else to tell her that she's pretty but not enough time letting God show her that she's beautiful, a girl who could find every minuscule flaw in her complexion but doesn't remember that God chooses everything for a reason. When I look in a mirror, I see a girl who's trying hard to become the woman God created her to be but she's nervous and scared because she doesn't know how.
Look at your face in a mirror. What do you see? I know it isn't easy. Sometimes I think we avoid mirrors, just because we're afraid of what we'll see. Not just afraid that the outfit we were so excited about this morning doesn't look as nice as we thought it would. Afraid that the person we see in the mirror isn't the person we're supposed to be. We have to remember that the only thing we're ever "supposed to be" is what God has created us to be, and there is nothing that can ever derail God's plans. He will make everything beautiful in its time, so we don't ever need to be afraid of what the mirror is telling us.
~Sheridan
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