beauty

I want to talk today about what I think is one of the most beautiful and inspiring things in the world. It might sound odd and a little surprising, but it’s this…

…old women.

I’m being serious. I think old women are gorgeous. And today I write to tell all women, but especially those who have wrinkles and sagging skin and white hair, that you are stunning.

Old is of course completely relative, and I’m not here to give a definition to the meaning of old, so I suppose it’s up to you if you want to take in this message as an old woman or as a woman looking ahead to being old. Because we’ll all get there one day. Being old is not a curse or a negative thing or something to dread or run from…old is completely valuable and awesome!

It’s certainly no surprise for me to say that we live in a culture obsessed with youth and physical appearance, and I just don’t get it. I suppose you could tell me that I don’t get it because I’m still relatively young and don’t actually have to wrestle with the reality of a different face and hair and body that comes with age staring back at me in the mirror…but no matter, I believe we have lost something truly precious in our cultural quest for youth. Old age is a precious and inspiring and beautiful thing.

I can only imagine what it must feel like for an older woman in today’s world. I know what it feels like for a younger woman in today’s world, and it’s a little brutal sometimes. Does it feel that way for an older woman? Or does age teach you the important things and give you that extra heart strength to see past all the crazy lies and standards that the world throws at us?

I know so many older woman that I think are so beautiful. Once again, it’s not so much about how they look, but the heart and spirit and soul of quiet and rest and grace that I feel. My favorite customers at the peach stand are the old ladies with white hair and wrinkles and hands that have worked hard, and when they look at me with a sweet smile and call me dear, I just want to hug them all. They are beautiful, and I wonder if they even know it.

I have two grandmother’s that I love so much, and they both have the prettiest white hair that I sincerely hope becomes a family trait passed down to me when I reach the white hair age. I don’t know if they like their white hair or not, but I certainly do. I think Solomon the King had it right when he penned, “gray hair is a crown of splendor…” because it certainly looks like such on their heads. I don’t know if they sometimes think back to their younger years and wish they had that skin and hair and body back, but I hope they don’t. I hope they feel as beautiful as they are in this season of their life.

And wrinkles…I think wrinkles are beautiful and speak of a life lived and time passed. Wrinkles show that you’ve experienced life and you’ve lived through many seasons and that you have a thousand stories to tell. The lines on your face only show that you’ve laughed a lot and that, my dears, is to be celebrated. And honestly, one of the scariest things in the world is a woman’s face that has been injected with who-knows-what in order to take away the lines and wrinkles…those lines and wrinkles are gorgeous, and let no television show or magazine advertisement or celebrities plastic face convince you otherwise.

Age and all it’s realities is a beautiful and inspiring thing, and our world needs it.

So, dear old woman, we need you. We need your white hair and wrinkles to remind us of the importance of living life well and to laugh often and to walk the journey ahead of us. You inspire us to embrace a true understanding of beautiful, and you give us courage to fight against the war for our souls. Your wisdom and experience and knowledge on birthing babies and canning summer produce and making it through a difficult season and how to love a man and making the perfect loaf of bread is needed. It is vital.

And a word to the younger…our culture does everything it can to distance us from the wisdom of the older ones. Older people are looked down on and laughed at and disregarded in the time that we live in, and I firmly believe that if we too fall prey to this mindset, we will be the ones to lose. To disregard the older ones in your life and what they feel, think, and know will only set you up for failure. They are important, and it is only in your best interest to honor them.

So whether you’re old or waiting to become so, remember this: you are one of the most stunning things in the world.

What about you: what are your thoughts on aging and embracing a changing look? Older women: is it difficult to embrace your age in today’s world?

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Ok, first of all…the title of this post is a little misleading. Forgive me for that.

Because I’m not going to tell you how to feel beautiful.

I can’t tell you how to feel beautiful, because beautiful is not a feeling. We think it is. We think beautiful is a feeling that is there on some days or some occasions or sometimes only on some moments…and the days that we don’t feel that feeling, it just feels so…yucky. It feels so purposeless…like somehow I am failing miserably at the very thing that I was designed for.

I’ve talked about beauty countless times before, and every time that my heart centers on that topic, I’m amazed again at just how central beauty is to my existence. It is so vital to the health and life of my heart, and that, my friends, is a good thing. It’s how I was designed to be.

But somehow in the course of life and in the crazed ways of our culture, beauty has lost it’s…well, beauty. It’s become something entirely different than what it was created to be. Beauty has become cheap and plastic and fake and actually completely unattainable in our culture. The world has taken something to essential and so valuable and so core to the heart of a woman and turned it against her.

Our beauty is used against us, and that makes me mad.

It’s used against us because we have beauty and we are beauty…but all the voices of this world only laugh and mock us for daring to entertain that as truth for even a second. “…you? beautiful? it cannot be true because you don’t have the right hair or facial structure or body type or engaging personality…you look nothing like beauty…you are a mere shadow of what you are meant to be.” And when we listen to that, it leaves us only two choices: try harder or stop trying at all. Care too much or care not at all. Neither option will give you the life of purpose and joy and beauty that our Creator created us for.

Your beauty can only be taken from you if you believe it to be taken from you.

Once again, I’m not trying to sound all guru here…where you just believe something and it will be so. But actually that’s really the deal here. Beauty is a state of existence and cannot be taken from you…I don’t care what you weigh or what you look like or how little or how much makeup you wear or if you have wrinkles or acne scars or cellulite or deformities or anything else that our screwed up society tells you is a flaw. Your beauty cannot be taken from you. Period.

We have reduced beautiful to a feeling, when all along, beautiful is a state of being. It is a characteristic of woman, every woman. No one is exempt, no matter what.

We have reduced beautiful to something physical, something you can see. But I say this: you cannot see beautiful, you can only feel beautiful. I know that sounds like a contradiction because I’ve just said that you can’t actually feel beautiful, but what I mean by that is that I don’t see beauty in another person with my physical eyes, but I feel her beauty with my soul. Think of the women you know that are physically gorgeous, but yet they are hard and driven and leave you feeling empty instead of filling up your soul with life and grace and femininity. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be that kind of woman. I want to be the woman who gives life…not through my appearance, but through my heart.

This might show my age and inner teenager, but as I was writing this post, I literally pulled up the song Beautiful Soul by Jesse McCartney on YouTube…it completely took me back to those hilarious days as a teenager feeling like you were on top of the world with the music blasting and friends laughing and your whole life in front of you (please tell me i’m not the only one who used to love this song). Those were good days…but these are better. Anyway, I feel like this song captures the idea of beauty so well: “i don’t want another pretty face, i want you and your beautiful soul.” Beautiful has nothing to do with your face or body, but everything to do with who you are.

You can’t feel beautiful, because it’s not a feeling.

I know this whole idea is so so SO much easier to say than to do. Trust me, I feel it too. I feel that raging battle every day inside of me to let the world give me the standard and to do all that I can to meet that standard. But I know this…even if I were able to somehow meet all those standards of the perfect hair and face and body and essentially turn into a Barbie doll (ew), I would still not be satisfied. My soul would still not feel beautiful, because beautiful is not a feeling.

And that’s why I can’t tell you how to feel beautiful…I can only tell you to be beautiful, because that is what you are. But I believe this: that the more I realize that beautiful isn’t a feeling, the more beautiful I will actually feel.

What about you: do you tend to see beautiful as a feeling instead of a state of being or a characteristic of yourself?

I’d love to hear your thoughts!