Beautiful vs. vain {thoughts of a loved woman}

So yes, girls, we all struggle over this…the whole, deeply ingrained, sometimes downright confusing and overly complex concept of our feminine beauty.

“We all work hard at being attractive, but many of us make the mistake of thinking it is stylish clothes, attractive hairstyles, or artfully applied makeup. While these outer things should not be ignored, they are not as important as your disposition, which should be sunny and bright.”
-Fascinating Womanhood

Isn’t it hard sometimes to find the line between what is cultivating beauty because, well, that’s part of our duty as women: to bring beauty to the world and particularly to our husband, home and family; and what is just plain vanity? Is it something we can measure by how many minutes a day we spend in front of a mirror, how much we let the number on the scale matter to us, how stressed we get over finding “the right” outfit on Sunday morning?

Maybe it’s good to step back and think about what it is we’re seeking, what we’re hungry for in the depth of our being. For me (and I’d be willing to guess this is the case for most women), it’s security. Security is one of the most fundamental feminine desires, to know and never have to doubt that someone loves us, that we are beautiful and precious to someone, that we have an intrinsic value to someone. We want unconditional love.

Of course, once recognizing this desire, one so deep that it can steal the breath from the center of me, the first place to take it is our dear Lord. The trickiest part, I think, of surrendering our insecurity in exchange for unconditional love, from God or other people, is just that: surrender. It means that I have to acknowledge that I am totally insecure without Divine love; that I am desperately in need of a love that does not pretend around my flaws, but takes me on as a whole. A love that will consume, purify, and re-create me into my truest self. That takes deep humility, which is the very enemy of vanity. Why is vice so perverse, to deepen our hungers that only virtue can fill up?

Of course, God, in His unsearchable Wisdom, has chosen to, very often, share this unconditional love with the heart of woman through the heart of a noble man. This is something that it is so right and natural to desire; though of course it is necessary that I find that love I hunger for in God first. Otherwise I will never be wholly satisfied or secure enough to give an unconditional love back to another wonderful, but imperfect, human being.

As we grow from girlhood into womanhood we become more aware of a desire in ourselves to be truly beautiful, with a beauty that will attract the virtuous sort of man we want for our husband. It’s instinctive, but can (and should) also rise to a spiritual level as we look inward at our heart and determine what virtues we need to adorn ourselves with to be ideal wives…and what vices we need to let go. We learn to cultivate our femininity not only on a spiritual level, but on mental, emotional, practical, and physical levels as well. It’s all part of blooming into a true woman; an essential and beautiful process.

I’ll be the first to admit that the appearance-cultivating part of this blooming has never been something that comes as naturally to me as it does to my sisters and mom. It’s not that I didn’t want to be pretty or was ever particularly tomboyish; I guess, through my teen hood, my mind was largely on other things, like being a nun or writing a book… It just took effort to put much time into styling my hair. My makeup routine has always been quick (like a minute or two) and light. Clothing…it never bothered me quite as much as it does some girls to wear the same outfit again, even if I wore to church the weekend before last. I hate clothes- and shoe-shopping. Most days find me in modest jeans and a sweater…I guess that’s just me!

Over the past couple years, as my longing for love and marriage grew, I started to pay a little more focused attention…trying to “learn my hair”…spending a little more time on my makeup to look my age, those sort of things. I got my ears pierced. I put more effort (and, at times, stress) into “looking my best” when going out because, “you never know who you’ll meet!” But strange feelings of not being good enough bothered me sometimes, the longer I spent in front of a mirror. Maybe it was a fine line I was treading between caring too much and not enough. Maybe I was more insecure than I realized.

Perhaps not every girl has an image of how they’ll look the first time they meet the man of their dreams. I think mine was somewhat vague, but along the lines of all dressed up, hair done up, face made up, for a party or dance or something like that. “Looking my best”. And hey, sometimes it happens–I saw it happen to my now happily-married older sis!

But I guess it had to be different for me.

I don’t think it was a coincidence, in God’s eyes, that I forgot my makeup that life-changing trip to Wyoming that I made last summer. It forced me, for the two weeks I was up there, to kind of let go and live. I admit sometimes, not feeling like I looked my best, I kept the attitude of “well it’s not like anyone around here is going to see me again!” But the affection and affirmation that my loving cousin (and little second cousins!) surrounded me with helped me just be me, and realize me was perfectly enough, with or without makeup, if I was a me full of love and joy. And I was–I was full of the joy of living, of being on an adventure and loving people I had never had a chance to be close to before. I was growing through the new experiences, through the homesickness, through the challenges and joys, and gaining a quiet self-respect, in a way I really needed to. It’s not that my family had ever given me anything less–for me, I guess I just needed a dramatic experience of what I already knew for it to really click in me.

But the best was yet to come, on the day that my delight in my adventure in God’s country was at its apex. I was going to ride horses, soak in a kind of “country” that I had only been able to dream about, and I didn’t care too much anymore about how I looked. I was grinning ear-to-ear most of the time as I got dusty and sweaty and sun burned (and saddle sore!), as the wind did what it wanted with my hair.

And then…there he was.

I’ve already written about this, I know, and about how our relationship got started through a beautifully old-fashioned sequence of letters.

“Ordinarily, love begins for a young girl when she becomes well enough acquainted with a young man to develop a spiritual affinity with him. She admires his qualities and abilities. She likes his attitude toward life in general. She begins to feel at ease, at home in his presence.
“Then other things begin to happen. A simple phone call brings a flutter to her heart. Her pulse quickens when he calls at her home. She has eyes for no one but him.”
-The Wife Desired

(I was reading this wonderful book last night and came across this paragraph…yep that’s what’s happened!)

Even in those early stages of acquaintance, Max was good at assuring me that what he saw in me, both in our brief, unlikely first impression and in my letters, was beautiful to him. It gave me an irreplaceable, quiet security to know that, somehow, this wonderful man saw not what I may have felt like I looked like that day (a disheveled, half-frazzled girl), but, to use his own words, a good-looking woman. 🙂 That security has only deepened with time and our growth into real friendship and love. He has made it clear to me that I’m beautiful to him, inside and out. He has made me comfortable to the point that I’ll send him selfies before I’ve put on makeup…and made me smile by asking honestly why I need makeup.

Not long ago I asked him if he remembered his “second impression”, or what he thought the first time we talked over FaceTime, a couple months after we first met. One of the first things he said was that he’d recognized my smile.

One time, when we were first getting used to talking over video chat, he asked if I wanted to talk when I wasn’t expecting it. I’d gotten out of the shower not long before and my hair was back in a tight bun (and I hadn’t exactly gotten the impression from my sister that this was my best ‘do). “Now?!” I remember texting. “My hair’s not fixed!”

“Haha I don’t care,” he wrote. When we got on he looked at me and said, “You said your hair’s not fixed?” With a smile he took off his hat. “Look at my hair!”

This is all to display how, in his genuine love and affirmation, he’s made me rethink my attitude towards my appearance. It’s still a balancing act, but one I see in a new sort of light. The act of “getting pretty”, especially before going to church together or going on a date”, is something I can do with an attitude of love instead of fear. If he’s ready to talk, I don’t worry overmuch about my hair (except to be sure it’s neat and all)…but I’m sure to put on my best smile (which to be honest isn’t much of an effort when I’m talking to him…)

I’m sure I’ll always be learning and growing when it comes to cultivating my femininity, inside and out. But this new chapter of experiencing God’s love and caring through this dear man has been such a vital step in that journey. It is humbling, in a way, to receive a love that sees more value in you than you see yourself sometimes. It’s a beautiful, and perhaps one of the the most powerful, antidote to insecurity and vanity.

A simple movement {thoughts on blogging}

It’s October…possibly my favorite month of the whole lovely year. It’s a cool day, but the sun just came out and I glimpse blue out my window. It’s one of those rare but kind of nice, slow days when, for one ailment or another, you really don’t feel up to doing much at all…and, coincidentally, don’t have much to do.

I realize I haven’t been doing too much blogging over the past several months…obviously I’m not the most disciplined writer…but, not long ago, a reminder from my grandmother about how much she enjoys my posts hinted to me that I ought to make a little more concentrated effort to keep this up.

Sometimes I wonder exactly why I blog. It’s easy for intentions and reasons to change with time–and especially as a young woman, for there to be about twenty of them all tangled together like spaghetti noodles, swimming in a sauce of emotions. It’s been easy at times to blog out of vanity–adding to the noise, speaking just because I feel like making my voice heard, and believe all these faceless people are listening, like I have something really important to say all the time. It’s also easy in times of loneliness to blog because it makes me feel that, when I see ‘likes’ popping up on my latest post, I’m listened to, agreed with, and valued.

The simple reality is, I don’t really have people hanging on my every word…and it’s probably better that I don’t because I’ve said and written many more useless words than worthwhile ones. And even when the few people who do read what I write out here (other than people I really know, like my grandmother), ‘like’ a post, I’m not really connecting with them in a relationship, the way people were created to. I can just feed off flattery, if you get right down to it. This digital network promises to ‘connect’ me to countless others, but most of the time, that promise proves pretty empty when I follow its siren song looking for companionship and love.

We’re all lonely. But let’s face it, folks…social media isn’t the cure for that loneliness. Rather it is very, scarily, capable of distancing us from real relationships with those right around us…those we might notice if we weren’t absorbed in our screens…and, most importantly, with the God always waiting for our attention.

I believe that a lot of good can come from blogging. But, like any other form of social media, there’s also a lot of danger in it. When you’re spewing your thoughts at a faceless crowd somewhere in digital oblivion, and not people who know you, love you, and keep you real, it’s all too easy to slip from writing to exalt the truth into writing to exalt yourself…from a desire to inspire into a subtle channel for bragging…from a desire to comfort others by sharing your hard times to an excuse to complain…from a desire to be honest into sometimes talking too much about yourself. In a world that says we need to express ourselves in our art, it’s difficult to remember sometimes that true art is supposed be an expression of something far greater than just us–a small expression, never sufficient, of Truth and Beauty Himself.

To say all that more simply, there’s danger when, as I so often have, I let the motive of writing for God’s glory alone get tangled up with many other lesser motives that somehow benefit me. With God, it’s all or nothing…there is no serving two masters, right?

 Just a couple of days ago was the anniversary of the death of Venerable Carlo Acutis, who will one day, I’m sure, be the patron of those who do anything with computers. He was a genius when it came to computers…but his spiritual genius outshone the rest of his amazing qualities.

A thought Carlo once wrote in a journal seems to sum up what I’ve been trying to say all this time:

“Sadness is the gaze turned towards oneself,
happiness is the gaze turned towards God.
Conversion is nothing but moving the gaze from the bottom to the top. A simple movement of the eyes is enough.”

What I’m slowly learning, Carlo, with all his talents that far surpass mine, knew already at a younger age. There is no happiness for us in anything except the face of God–and we cannot share our focus with anything else–we must always, in the eye of our soul, through every part of our lives, gaze upon God. Is that not what Heaven will be? If we could glimpse Heaven here, in every moment of our lives, in every word we may right, would we choose to?

It’s always easier to correct the external than the internal. It would be just like me to come to all this and react by never writing anything except about God specifically…but I don’t think the point Carlo is making leads there. That simple movement means that this heart and mind of mine, behind the writing, must always be turned towards God, so that every word is not just a word, or some restless expression of myself, or a plea for empty attention…but an act of love that always knows it is not enough, so will never stop trying to be more. A humble effort to glorify Truth and Beauty…the Eternal Word…in whose image and likeness we were made…without Whom nothing was made.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m not sitting here writing this to impress you–not anymore. I refuse to write so you can know all about me, to be just one more distraction in this all-too-distracting world, just one more voice in the cacophony. (As an old Switchfoot song begs the listener, ‘If we’re adding to the noise, turn off this song!’) I’m not writing it to make myself feel better about what I have by bragging, thinking someone somewhere must wish they had my life. I’m no longer writing to make myself feel less alone–because, after all, I know I’m very loved; plus, we all need to feel lonely sometimes to find the only One who can fill our deepest longings.

So I’m making two commitments for this blog, here and now–I’m going to write with a little more discipline, and do it with purer motives. When I sit down to write with something true to say, I’ll pray to say it humbly and well, to serve the truth rather than use it. When I come with a joy I want to express, I’ll try to draw your mind to the Giver instead of just the gift. When I come with a lonely ache in my throat, I’ll remind myself of those who really love me…like my grandmother…and also about who you might be, and the loneliness and struggles you might have, that I’m not capable of fixing. And I’ll pray you find real companionship in the Faithful Friend who is always at your side. Who dwells, not in the Internet, not in the world’s noise, but in our souls. In quiet, and solitude, and the heart that is humble enough to realize it needs Him more than anything, and Him alone.