.JPG)
Message in the Mirror
Well, here I am again sitting on my
bedroom carpet and leaning against my bed, my Acer netbook opened on my
lap. Today the Lord used a very trivial
lesson to open my eyes to a new perspective, and I wanted to document it and
share with you all.
Yesterday, my mom and I had stopped
in Walgreens to get some makeup, and since there was a buy-one-get-one-half-off
sale going on, I ended up getting a green eye shadow as the half-off item. For those of you that know me well, you know
I’ve only ever worn white and petal pink eye shadow; I’m not the type for
radical colors. But I figured, why not
try a bold color like green and just see what it looks like?
So this morning, I took out my
makeup bag from under my bathroom sink and began experimenting. It looked like a pretty shade of green in the
bottle- “Extreme Green” they called it- but as I began “painting” the liquid
eye shadow on my eyelids, I decided “Monster Green” would’ve been a more
appropriate name instead. Later I
concluded that “Shrek Green” was the best way to describe it though. As I was smearing it on, I laughed at a
visual that crossed my thoughts. I could
just see my future boyfriend someday telling his parents that he wanted to ask
me out. “You can’t like her!” his mom
protested. “What’re you thinking? She wears creepy green eye shadow!”… and
creepy it did look on me. It’s
fine for some girls I’m sure, but needless to say, my mom and I decided that
green just isn’t my thing.
It was a funny flunked experiment,
although a good effort, but as I was removing the “Shrek Green” makeup from my
eyelids however, my thoughts turned to more serious reflections. The green eye shadow hadn’t necessarily
looked bad on me. I looked like a
teenager again though, like I was a typical sixteen-year-old trying to look
older than my age. I could’ve passed as a
makeup model for COVERGIRL Intense Shadowblast Extreme Green Eyeshadow+Primer. I realized then that for years, growing up,
that was the look that I had wanted. I
wanted to look like a glamor girl, like a model. To be the dolled-up, popular girl that
catches a boy’s attention everywhere she goes and has a string of boys
competing for her time and affection. To
meet the world’s standard of attractive.
But as I looked in the mirror at my reflection,
my green eye shadow bold enough to catch me the attention I had wanted for so
long during my teenage years, I realized that I hadn’t really known what I was
yearning for then. I was reminded of
such a powerful scene from one of my favorite movies, The
Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of The Dawn Treader. One of the main characters Lucy Pevensie doubts
her self-worth, and one night, she recites a magic spell she had found to turn
herself into the image of her older sister, who she thinks is more beautiful
than herself. After glimpsing the
consequences of having wished herself away though, she shudders in horror at
the remembrance. “That was awful,” she
admits to Aslan the Great Lion. “But you
chose it, Lucy,” Aslan reminds her. And
then the words of her reply echoed to me this morning. “I didn’t mean to choose all of that.” As I yearned as a young girl to be considered
beautiful when compared to models and glamor girls, I didn’t realize either
that I was wishing for “all of that.”
The dolled-up glamor girl was who I
had thought I wanted to be… but I realized in my moment of reflection that she
wasn’t. The girl that I had
wanted to become was not the girl that God had wanted me to become. Sometimes, I wonder if maybe that’s the case
for many of us. We think we want
something so bad, we make ourselves over to be the person we want to be, but in
reality, that person is not who God desires us to become. Our wants and His wants are not
always the same.
Lately, the Lord has been doing a
tremendous work in me, maturing me mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, so
this transformation in my own desires had been begun long before just this
morning. But He used my “Shrek Green”
eye shadow experiment to open my eyes to see the work He had already begun in
me. He’s conformed my wants to His
wants now, and I see that the glamor girl, beauty pageant queen reputation
I had thought I wanted isn’t really the reputation I want after all. Rather than being known as a fashionable
dolled-up model that all the guys are crazy about, I’d much rather be known as
a pretty, respectable, godly young woman that would make an excellent homemaker
wife and mother someday. That’s the
person I want to be now, the person He wants me to be, and who He’s
helping me to become, for as my best friend wisely reminded me once, “…we can
trade our virginity to be like other girls at any moment; however, those who
have sold themselves short can never be like us again.” “Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting;
but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.” (Pr 31:30) “Your beauty should not come from outward
adornment, such as braided hair and the wearing of fine clothes. Instead, it should be that of your inner
self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth
in God’s sight.” (1Pe 3:3&4)
As I said, what we want is
not always what the Lord wants for us.
He loves us unimaginably and knows what’s best for us. He knows us better than we know ourselves,
and therefore, He knows what will really make us happy, despite what we might
tell Him we want. The same goes with the
kind of young man I used to say I wanted to marry someday. I realize now that my former ideal future
husband is not really the kind of man that I could be truly happy with as his
wife. The Lord is conforming my ideals
to His in every aspect, and maybe it’s time you ask Him to begin the same work
in you. Maybe it’s time for some inner
reflection and evaluation of your dreams and your desires. Are they truly what the Lord wants for
you? Or are they only what you
want for yourself? If you find that your
ideas of what will make you happy are contrary to God’s, maybe it’s time to
take the makeup off, stop pretending, and allow Him to transform your desires
and conform them to His. I’ll never be
the popular glamor girl I used to dream of being, but I’ve realized that being
the unassuming, intelligent girl He created me to be is of far greater value
and worth than any of the attentions I could’ve received from my physical
appearance. The inner beauty of being
who God wants you to be and of doing what He wants you to do brings the
greatest happiness you’ll ever know.
While He was still just forming you in your mother’s womb, the Lord knew
the person He wanted you to grow up to be.
“All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of
them came to be.” (Ps 139:16) As Aslan
later tells Lucy, “Don’t run from who you are.”
Or from who you’re supposed to be.
“Before
I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart…”
Jeremiah
1:5
No comments:
Post a Comment