DISTORTING BEAUTY

The numbers are in... and they're not good. Anorexia numbers have been rising for guys for years and they have how reached levels equal to those of women. That's right: there are now just as many men as there are women who suffer from anorexia. Why? The conductors of this study noted that men are now listening to the same messages from society that women have been listening to.

This is quite disturbing - what we teach is beauty. Even as Christians, we often try to convey a concept of inner-beauty, but we display something quite different. We ourselves spend much time doing things like fixing our hair, donning nice clothes, and surrendering to feelings of lust. Because this is what we model, those who learn from us (i.e., young men and women) never have any real concept of true beauty. See, the thing is true beauty is not just inner-beauty. True beauty is when inner-beauty is so prevelent, becomes outer-beauty. This is the beauty from God. But when we don't recognize this true beauty, we become vulnerable to the lies that this world gives us about beauty. We begin to think that outer-beauty is true beauty, and we completely ingore the world of real beauty that God intends for us to see.

Unfortunately, because we Christians are so bad at modelling this, we (and those we teach) only understand true beauty when we (they) catch a glimpse of it in our lives. And when we do glimpse real beauty, it is so much more beautiful than anything we've ever seen before. So catch a glimpse of true beauty this week, and you'll learn something about God.

I thought this was an interesting clip about what the world considers beautiful or rather how it distorts it. (HT: RS)