You are Beautiful

Happy Thanksgiving Eve!!!

What are you going to say tomorrow when someone asks why you're thankful? With my family, we’ll go around the table as we eat and name blessings we remember from this past year. My children will go far beyond their five pieces of corn we give to each person to name one blessing per kernel. My husband and I will too. But for me it wasn't always that way.

So today I wanted to share a little about a reason to praise I wonder if you've thought of~ because God says you are beautiful.

Do you believe that? Do you thank God for that? Most people don't.

I didn't for years and years. I grew up in a painful home and jumped into a relationship as a teen that I knew I shouldn't be in. But I did it anyway because he said I was beautiful.

Then he raped me.

I didn't feel beautiful anymore. I felt like trash. And I spent the better part of my young adult years knowing God loved me, but feeling that I was "less than" everyone else. Ugly. Used goods.

My story in God Allows U-Turns for Teens is about how I went from saying "If Only I Were Beautiful" to knowing and receiving what God says is truth. I'd like to share two quotes and what made my U-Turn happen.

"No love of the natural heart is safe unless the human heart has been satisfied by God first." (Oswald Chambers)

"We are not wrong to think we desperately need to be loved. We do. Our need does not constitute anyone else's call but God's" (Beth Moore)

So how did God make those two statements “real” to me? He had me teach them to a group of young ladies who didn’t believe God said they were beautiful either. I looked deep into their gorgeous eyes and into their even more stunning souls and caught a glimpse of the beauty God sees.

Then God led me to the mirror and said the same about me.

I wanted to turn away because I still didn’t see what God saw. But He kept speaking to my heart over the next few weeks. I became convinced that my bottomless need to be loved, to be seen as beautiful, would be satisfied first in God.

Or it wouldn’t be satisfied at all.

So I stopped saying, “If only I could lose a few pounds” or “I would be beautiful if only _____ changed."

We can all fill in that blank, can’t we?

What I started saying instead were the words God had spoken to me. “I see you. You are beautiful. You are loved and you are Mine.”

I still don’t always believe that. But those times are far less frequent. What happens more often now are the times I look in the mirror and smile simply because that’s what my heavenly Daddy does.

So this Thanksgiving I’ll enjoy some turkey and pumpkin pie and I will not step on the scale later. Instead, I’ll look in the mirror and smile.

I’ll listen to the words God says. Will you join me?

Take a good look in the mirror. God has much to say about what He sees there. Listen closely. He is enthralled with your beauty. (Psalm 45:11)

The King is enthralled with you. Enjoy Him.

Happy Thanksgiving y’all!