AM I BEAUTIFUL?

What if I am beautiful?  Not just my inner self, but my outer self as well?  How will that change my perspective of myself?  Will I allow the world to define my beauty?  Will I finally believe others when they say I am beautiful?  Will the Lord speak truth into my life?

For all my life, I have looked at other women and compared them to me.  What do I define as outer beauty?  Long hair that is wavy and luxurious, for one.  Color of hair doesn’t really matter to me.  I have wavy hair, but it is frizzy and unruly.  A slender body that is free from stretch marks and free of fat.  My body is not slender in the least.  I could lose more weight than I have been.  And I will most likely never be slender.  My body is not that type.  It is big boned and more prone to excess weight.  Eyebrows that is full and even.  My eyebrows are missing hairs, I believe.  They are full, but very uneven.  Skin that is smooth and free of any kind of blemishes.  I have moles on my arms, especially in the summer.  And my cheeks stay red constantly.  And I have stretch marks from my constant losing and gaining weight.  Full lips and perfect white teeth.  My lips are full, especially my bottom one.  My teeth are stained and in horrible shape.  Plus they are crooked.  No, I don't believe that I am beautiful.

Some people have called me beautiful.  Especially my future husband.  He calls me beautiful very often.  And it hurts him when I don’t believe him.  Yet my definition of beauty has been so in grown in me that I cannot perceive why he sees me as beautiful.   They say that love is blind, and maybe that is true for him.  Yet he has been calling me beautiful since we first began talking online.  Surely if he didn’t think I was beautiful, he wouldn’t have sent me a message.  I simply cannot see what he sees.  To me, I have a lot of physical blemishes that makes me feel unattractive and ugly.  The most I will go is pretty.  But I don’t feel pretty when I have so much excess weight.  My weight is defining how I see myself.  Should I believe my future husband when he calls me beautiful?

Is it the world’s label that makes me believe that I am not beautiful?  The world labels outward beauty.  You have to be a size 0, have long hairless legs, have gorgeous hair, and have no imperfections at all.  The world looks at weight.  The more you weigh the less beautiful you are.  What if the world is wrong?  What if it doesn’t matter about the pounds you need to lose or not lose?  If the world is wrong, then what defines beauty?  Should I believe the world?

I long to feel beautiful.  I am not the kind of woman that spends excess amounts of money on makeup and beauty treatments.  For one, I don’t have the money.  Even if I did, I wouldn’t be spending it on makeup and beauty treatments.  There are better things to spend money on.  Maybe beauty is an inner thing, not an outer thing.  Maybe it doesn’t matter what I wear or what I weigh.

For so long I have been labeled as fat, ugly, and disgusting.  Kids in school were the first ones to label me as such.  And the abuse I suffered through didn’t help matters any.  Every time I was abused, I felt dirty, disgusting, and ashamed.  The kids only hammered in the truth.  Looking back, I wonder what was wrong with me.  Or maybe what was right?  What caused my abusers to abuse me?  I know it wasn’t my fault.  I was just a child, and adults are supposed to protect you.  Yet, what did they see in me that they didn’t see in someone else?  Did they see my beauty and wanted to destroy it?  Or did they see something else?  I don’t blame the kids for making fun of me and calling me names.  They were children; they didn’t know any better.  And they were being taught themselves what beauty is labeled as, just as I was being taught to hate myself and to consider myself as ugly. 

Years of believing I am ugly makes it hard to change.  And the fact that I consider myself as pretty is a huge step for me.  It didn’t come easily, but through years of constant doubt, struggles, and ultimately healing.  Would I say I am attractive?  No, I would not.  Yet my future husband insists that I am very attractive, especially to him.  Is he right?  Am I wrong?  Or is he wrong, and I am right?  Should I believe him?  Or should I believe myself?

The Lord calls me a precious jewel.  The word precious has a very special significance to me.  The first time I was called precious was in prayer, and the Lord softly told me I was precious to Him.  The first time a person called me precious was in church when an elderly woman called me “Precious”. 

God calls me a precious jewel.  Yet does He call me beautiful?  When I think of a precious jewel, my thoughts immediately turn to a rare and beautiful stone.  The jewel is beautiful in darkness and in light, but its beauty really shines through in the light.  Is God trying to tell me I am beautiful by calling me His precious jewel?  Is He telling me that my beauty reflects even in the midst of darkness?  Is He lying?  Or is He blinded by love?  God is truth.  Do I dare call Him a liar?  If He is lying about my being beautiful, maybe He is lying about everything else.  If I believe He is lying, I need to reconsider everything I spiritually know.  No, God is honest.  Is He telling me that I am beautiful?  If He calls me beautiful, then should I believe it?  Should I believe Him?

Maybe beauty isn’t in the eye of the beholder.  Maybe beauty isn’t in the eyes of the world.  Maybe beauty is in the eyes of the Lord God.  And if He calls me beautiful, maybe I should believe Him.

MY REBEKAH STORY

Rebekah was a young woman who left everything to marry a man she hadn't met.  Abraham sent his most trusted servant to his hometown in search of a wife for his son, Isaac.  Rebekah was given a choice, and she chose to follow the Lord's prompting and marry her cousin, who was a complete stranger to her.  She must have had a lot of faith and trust in the Lord to move to a new country and to live with strangers.  I'm sure she had lots of questions on her way to marry Isaac.  What was her future husband like?  Would he be kind to her?  How would he provide for her?  Would they have lots of children, or no children at all?  What did he look like?  Was he handsome or ugly?  Many, many questions must have flooded her mind.  I wonder if doubts swirled around her head, whether this was from God or not.  And I am sure if doubts did enter her mind, the Lord reassured her.  And she ended up marrying Isaac and having Esau and Jacob.  These two boys later became two countries, Edom and Israel.

Today I am Rebekah.  I am marrying a man I met online.  He lives in another state.  I haven't met him, at least not for another two weeks.  We talk on the phone all the time, and we chat online a good bit of our free time.  And we have video chatted.  So I know he is real.  He knows I am real.  To everyone I know and love, what we are doing makes no sense at all.  Common sense would tell us to wait to marry until we meet and then decide.  Common sense would tell us to wait at least a year to get married, like normal people.  Common sense would say to have both of us meet the other's family.  And most of all, common sense would be screaming at us that one of us should have a job and a place to live before marriage.

Yet, at this time in my life, I am making a flying leap of faith.  Just like Rebekah.  I don't know what is going to happen when I land.  Yet, the Lord has called me to live a life of faith.  And sometimes, that faith makes no sense to others.  It doesn't even make sense to me.  For to marry a man I've never met is so out of character for me.  To do it the way we are doing it is not like me at all.  I like to have a plan and the details.  When, where, how, why, and what for all scream in my head to be answered before I commit to it.  I don't have all the answers this time.  Every time I bring my concerns to the Lord, He reassures me that everything is working out.

He truly is working everything out.  The time we chose is the right time, though everyone says it's not.  We are putting the Lord first, and He is telling us that the date we chose is right.  Yes, I will be coming back home until everything else works out for me to move there.  Yet, I know that the Lord will work everything out.  He has so far.  One thing He has blessed me with is finances.  I am no longer concerned how I'm going to pay to  move there.  He has provided for me.  How He has increased my finances during this time of only working part time, I have no idea.  But He has always provided for me.  And He will continue to provide for me even after I am married and living with my husband.  I am no longer concerned about it.  I have put it all in His hands.

Everything I am doing, marrying a man I haven't met and planning on moving to his state in the near future, I am doing strictly by faith.  For if I sit down and consider everything, I will back out.  The right time will never come, even though He is screaming at me that it has come.  

The Lord reminds me every day that I am Rebekah.  I am traveling to another state to marry a man I've never met.  And one day, I will pack everything I own and move to my husband's state.  I am not to be concerned with the details.  He is working everything out.  I am seeing it every day, and I am feeling His presence in everything.  I am in constant prayer and in constant communication with Him.

I am facing a cliff, and very soon, I will be jumping off of it and flying into the unknown.  

To make everyone feel at ease, or at least that I haven't lost my mind, I will now tell you a little bit about my future husband.  To protect his privacy, I am not revealing his name, nor the state he lives in.  

I was on a free dating website.  I will only say I had to do a lot of weeding out.  One day, I got so frustrated with the responses I was getting that I decided to stop online dating.  I prayed about it and left it up to the Lord.  "Today is the day I am done with online dating," I told God that morning.  "One more bad apple messages me, I'm done.  If You want him to come through this site, then You'd better send him now."  That same day, I got a message from my future husband, though at the time I didn't know it.  When I saw his message, I figured why not give him a chance.  If he turns out to be like all the others, I'm deleting my profile.  His message totally blew me away.  It wasn't the normal message that I was so used to getting.  He told me he read my profile (actually READ it!) and told me everything he liked about it.  And then he told me about his faith in Christ.  Number one priority checked!  We didn't go through the superficial things of getting to know each other.  We went straight to our faith in Christ.  And it was just what I was looking for.  He has met every single one of my criteria for a husband.  He is everything I have ever wanted, and he is everything I need.  He is the Lord's gift to me, and I am His gift to him.

As the time passed, we grew closer every day, and we both knew we were made for each other shortly into our relationship.  We shared a connection that I call is a God connection.  And I have only been able to share that kind of connection with just a few people.  Well, he knew first that I was to be his wife.  It took me a little while longer to be convinced of it myself.  But once I knew he was the one for me, I began to pray for the Lord to bring us together.  And God has impressed upon me that He is working things out, and that it is happening quickly.  I would say marrying six months after our first message online is fast enough.  And I know that once I say "I do" that God is going to work the job and living situation out very soon afterward.

To everyone I know, this wedding is coming as a surprise, but to me and  him, it's not.  We have been planning to get married as soon as we both knew we loved each other.  We were just waiting on the timing.  And I knew from the time I began planning a visit to him that the visit would be a giant leap of faith for me.  Once both of us left the timing to the Lord, the date fell into place.  With both of us trusting the Lord and leaving everything to Him, everything that has happened and is happening is a God-thing.  Only God could have done this.  And He will be glorified in our marriage.  Without a doubt, I know that God is going to do amazing things in our lives.  And I cannot wait to watch it happen.