Mama, what happens if someday, someone calls me ugly?
She asked me that just as I was tucking the sheets under her 6 year old chin.
We are all dust and we all crumble under the pain and hurt of the brokenness around us.
And the one thing she longs for is beauty.
She searches it out and is the first one to point out the beauty of nature around us. The first one of my children to compliment a stranger, no matter how crazy or outlandish an outfit. She seeks beauty in all things and she is tender enough still to actually find it.
But what happens if...?
Somewhere along the way, over days or weeks or mere seconds, the thought crossed through her mind that the one who seeks the beauty may never have the beauty sought out in her...
And she was crushed.
Dust crumbles under the weight of worry and expectation and just like the ground we will return to, when it is dry enough, it will all just blow away...
I hold her close and recite those words long ago memorized at a bible camp when a longing for home made the tears run down my face; when I was all awkward and gangly and thought these words were never meant for me,
For you formed my inward parts;
God creates beauty and that means that you are beauty in motion. You are beautiful and there are only beautiful people. The only ugliness that we see are the ugly attitudes we allow...but when God created you all wonderful, He created true beauty.
She needs to know that He has His hand on her. That there is no where she can go that He won't find her...There is a God Who sees her. That when she is lost in a sea of loneliness or when the darkness of sin sweeps over her, she is never unseen by Him. He sees her and loves her and relentlessly pursues her.
Her covering of dust may make her feel ordinary, hidden, like nothing really special at all, but the One Who knit her together in my womb lifts her up and calls her beauty His own because He sees and He pursues and He gently lifts her up.
Then He turns to her mama, to me, and I see that He says this for my dusty and broken heart too...
Adoring:
God Who raises me from the dust, You use the fears of my daughter to speak into the fears of this heart and instead of ash blowing away, You cup this heart and pour Your love into a simple, fragile jar of clay. You are the Lifter of my head and the Lover of this soul and eyes that are lifted and filled with You, see true Beauty and lives are transformed...
