Imagine I give you a gift. It’s huge and beautifully wrapped in your favorite color of wrapping paper and topped with a perfect bow. It promises to be wonderful, but when you shred the paper and tear open the box, there is nothing inside. The box is empty.

Beauty is our wrapping paper. It can make a good present even better and add to our enjoyment, but beautiful wrapping paper alone is not worth anything.

Sadly, our culture seems to focus on our wrapping paper almost to the exclusion of the gift inside. The world whispers that if you are beautiful, everyone will love you, you will feel great, and life will be perfect.

And that’s certainly a handy way to get people to buy makeup, skin products, hair products, brand name clothes, and all the other things that the world says you simply must have in order to be beautiful.

But that is a lie. You do not need to have the perfect face or figure or clothes to be happy, hard as that might be to believe. Your Creator made you beautiful from the first, and He is the only one who will bring you ultimate joy.

My dear, you are beautiful even when you skip your makeup. Each and every one of us, boy or girl, man or woman, is beautiful because we are made in God’s image, and God is Beauty itself.

Here’s another story. A boy was born blind. Eventually he grew into a man and fell in love with a woman who was always kind to him. Though he could not see her face, he felt her heart, and she was beautiful to him.

One day, after they were married, the man was given a chance to get his vision back with a surgery. The surgery was successful, and at last the man could see! Everything was so bright and colorful it hurt his eyes. The first person he saw was his wife, who had been waiting for him all throughout the surgery.

What would he have thought? He wouldn’t mind if she weighed too much or didn’t have makeup on or didn’t have clear skin. He had only known her for her heart and her actions. He would think her beautiful.

Now I’m not saying beauty is a bad thing. In fact, God gave us a beautiful world to live in for our pleasure and his glory. Neither am I saying that you can only be either beautiful or good, because that’s not true. I’m just saying don’t lose the gift for the box. Don’t put so much store in your outward appearance that you don’t take care of your heart.

Think about it. What would the world be like if everyone took the time they spent getting the wrapping paper perfect and instead focused it on touching up the gift inside?

***Allison***