True Beauty

I sat on the school bus looking out the window at Kayla’s butt. It wasn’t big like my older brother and his friends had said just a few days earlier while joking and laughing about it. I was confused about their ideas of physical beauty, but still, I thought my brother’s friends had to be the coolest guys in the world.  My eyes moved to her face. She was pretty; blonde curly hair, a soft face with Scandinavian-blue eyes and a swipe of shimmery, light-pink lipstick across her lips.  I didn’t get it. Why would they say those mean things about her?  If Kayla couldn’t make the cut, then I didn’t have a chance.  I looked down at my thighs pressed against the vinyl bus seat. Too big. I scooted forward so my feet could touch the floor. I pushed my toes into the floor and lifted up my heals.  There, that way they looked thinner. I looked back out the window as we waited for the middle and high school kids to finish getting on the bus. I looked around at different girls wondering which ones were pretty and thin enough for my brother’s friends. That’s where I’d be next year, with the middle-schoolers. 

With an attractive enough face, and no particular talent as a child, I put time and energy into trying to make the most of the measure of good looks allotted to me. I learned to despise my very medium-framed body because it didn’t have the right proportions to make it desirable. I somehow decided that my best chance for love came from having an attractive appearance.

I know exactly how to make the most of my looks because, sadly, that’s where I’ve spent my 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell and others say it takes to become a master at something.  To this day, people are surprised at how different I look when I do my hair and makeup and when I don't. That’s how good I am at it.

In my early thirties, I started connecting with old friends from college on Facebook.  The thing that most of them remembered about me was how I taught them to do their makeup, pluck their eyebrows, or do their hair.  I was less than thrilled with that legacy.  Surely, I’d made a more valuable contribution to their lives then just helping them become more vain. Showing them some beauty tip was, in effect, teaching them that they too could now chase after the empty promise that beauty brings happiness and fulfillment.     

There are some women I’ve met at church, who would never be put on the cover of a magazine, but whose beauty is undeniable. They embody the definition of True Beauty that I’ve come up with: the undeniable power and light that shines forth from a woman who is truly converted to the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Have you met these women? They are the ones who speak with authority and confidence. When she speaks to you personally, you feel loved, special and heard. She exudes love. This love cannot be faked; it can’t be put on and taken off. When you talk to a woman with True Beauty you have no concern with how she looks, because you know how wonderful you feel in her presence. You know to listen because her words are wise.

I took diet pills off and on since college until a couple of years ago. I used them as a means of keeping my weight in check. I took them as soon as I was done nursing each of my children.  I took them when the scale got up too high or my pants got too tight. And when I finally decided to stop taking them, I proceeded to gain those 15 pounds I hated. Over the past couple of years, I have finally had to deal with what the diet pills allowed me to postpone facing: my deepest insecurities. When I found myself stressed or feeling insecure, the urge to take diet pills was stronger than I thought it would be. But I’d committed to myself that I would abstain, so that I could finally root out the dysfunction. I was getting too old to keep up that kind of nonsense and I knew like all addictions, it was only a false promise of happiness. I wanted to radiate love to others, like these women of True Beauty, but I knew I had to first cleanse the inner vessel and truly love myself. I knew that True Beauty was nothing I could buy, have injected or photo-shopped. It couldn’t be faked.  It is earned by turning to the Lord in our pain, instead of whatever one’s means of escape may be. 

Whenever we attempt to prove we are lovable and relevant, we are like a hamster running on a hamster wheel. We get on and “hustle for our worth” (Brene Brown). Satan has us running and running but we never arrive at a place where we will be smart enough, thin enough, righteous enough, or successful enough. And pretty soon, we find ourselves stuck and afraid. We believe we’ll be too badly wounded if we try to jump from the hamster wheel.  We wonder if it’s possible to feel worthy or lovable, if we are not frantically trying to avoid the pain and discomfort that is an inevitable part of life. But, the Savior has offered a solution, a way that enables us to break free from the highs and lows of basing our worth on anything other than His ever-constant love. His words encourage us to take that leap of faith. He gently offers, “Come, follow me. My yoke is easy, my burden is light."  

What are we ensnared by?  What has us hating ourselves, or, if that’s too strong for you, what has us envying others? What has us judging others harshly?  Or, in other words, what dysfunctional behavior have we adopted in order to obtain a sense of self-worth in moments of weakness and self-doubt.  Do we work too much, do we exercise for the wrong reasons, do we gamble, do we watch TV excessively or look at social media excessively to escape, do we starve ourselves, do we look at pornography, do we go over past accomplishments in our heads, do we go over our children’s accomplishments in our heads, do we look for the wrongs in others?  What is our “drug” of choice to numb us when anxiety and pain overcome us.  If we are not turning to the Savior in moments of pain and weakness, we only beget more pain.  We are forced to explore the answers to these questions when we become sick of being ensnared.  These deeply-rooted problems we’ve created bring us to the Lord with a broken heart and contrite spirit. Then, he can begin to help us and heal us. It’s miraculous.  

Once we recognize what we need to change, and acknowledge that we cannot do it on our own, we go to the Lord in prayer.  We admit we are helpless in this endeavor, and that we rely on him. There have been so many instances over the past couple of years where I have desperately asked the Lord to take away my pain. Sometimes, it was a pain that reverberated back to child hood, whose echo sounded without warning. Sometimes, I’d just cry and feel a pain I had no explanation for. Each time I went to the Lord, he’d show me how to move through the pain. He might give me the idea to go running or write in my journal. Sometimes, He'd give me the idea to call a friend who’d know just what to say. He always held my hand and helped me walk out of the pain. And I swear, with each act of faith, I felt my character build, my resilience sharpen. I learned that feeling pain, anxiety or discomfort wouldn’t break me. Discomfort inevitably arises for each of us. When in times past we turned to our pet vice for comfort or to numb ourselves, we can instead turn to the Lord, plead for help to see “things as they really are” rather than see them from a worldly view or from the evil traditions of our fathers.  We can search for further light and knowledge in the scriptures, and wait upon the Lord. We can practice living in His paradigm rather than the worlds’, all the while praying for help and strength against Satan’s lure to trust in the “arm of flesh” for the solution.  As we put aside our dysfunctional behavior, we will see the hand of the Lord helping us, giving us knowledge and showing the way.  And we will see miracles that let us know that it is He who is sustaining us.

This process is so individual and personal and can only happen if we are willing to put in the work and the waiting.  The Lord could very well direct one person to start up an exercise program to help them while they wait upon the Lord.  On the other hand, the Lord could tell another, who is addicted to exercise, to stop all together.  The tutelage of the Savior is so precise to what each one of us needs.  And this is one reason why we should never presume to judge the actions of another.  The Lord could direct us to any number of things that come from the world, like a book, a news story, or some insight from another faith tradition.  The key is that it has been directed from the Lord and is within the bounds the Lord has set.   

Satan’s lies are in the messages that the world tells us, the messages that say we have to change first and then maybe, just maybe we will then be acceptable, or worthy of being loved.  Even if we do follow the worldly prescription and arrive at the worldly ideal, the promise is empty and we will still be wondering what more we can do to prove our worth.

The Savior’s yoke is easy, and His burden light because He loves us no matter where we are at in our journey, or no matter what we’ve done. We don’t have to change before we can get his love, assistance or support, we only have to show him our broken hearts and contrite spirits.  He says “come follow me” and “his hand is . . .outstretched.”  And when we walk with him in love and obedience, he will gently teach us that our worth is infinite.  When we understand who we really are, we will no longer have to carry the burdens the world says we have to carry.  They no longer make sense in the paradigm in which we are daughters of God who have infinite worth. We no longer must numb ourselves or try to escape the fear caused by the inevitable pain of life, because we know the Lord’s atonement can help us pass through these experiences.  We will trust that our weaknesses, pain and anxiety can teach us and change our very beings for good when we utilize the Atonement to move through them. And we will understand that we can come as we are, right now, to the Savior and know that we will be loved and accepted. Right now.