My best friend in high school was beautiful. Everyone knew it, including the guy I liked. Seeing first-hand the benefits of being tall, having shiny long hair, clear skin, and a flat stomach, it is not hard to imagine that I valued, even idolized beauty. For a long time, I believed that because I didn't look this way, that I needed to change. Eventually, after too many disappointing failures, I believed that I could never morph into this one-dimensional idea of beauty. With great self-pity I settled instead for "second best," convincing myself that my personality would carry me through. This too however, left me unsatisfied as I saw that no amount of friends thinking I was funny, kind, or empathetic would erase the mental energy I fixated on obtaining physical beauty. One night as we were sitting on my bed, my friend looked over at me and said how much pressure she felt to maintain her image. Moreover, she wished that someone would look beyond her appearance and like her for her. I was shocked. How could she think such a thing? She had it all.
It wasn’t until my Junior year in college that I began to understand the emptiness my friend felt for not being valued for only one part of who she was. No amount of modeling pictures or gold stars for this year’s best dressed student could make up for that. She desired something more. She was asking the most fundamental question: am I loveable? Will someone, anyone, look deep into my heart and after seeing all of me still want to love me?
One couldn’t ask for a more powerful display of unwavering acceptance than that of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Not only does the Creator of all things, who has instilled in us the very desire to be found acceptable, physically prove how acceptable He finds us by offering himself in our place because He wants to spend forever with us, but He yearns for us to be near Him now.
As you ponder the magnitude of such love, are you satisfied, even thankful with who God has made you to be? Or, do you spend time focusing on that one thing you wished you had, that missing piece that when found will finish the puzzle?
--Aletheia
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