What's Your Beautiful?

I’ve been doing more reading that usual lately.  This is a good thing.  I’m getting a lot of good stuff to chew on on a pretty daily basis.  There are some nights that I’m just to exhausted, but most nights I at least get a chapter or two in in whatever book I’m reading.  What I’m currently devouring?  Made To Crave by Lysa TerKeurst.  I have no idea how to pronounce that.  Sorry.

I wasn’t entirely sure when I picked this book up how I’d feel about it.  Now that I’m about halfway through it, I’m finding that I’m really glad I picked it up.  She says a lot of really good stuff in it.  One paragraph I liked so much that I highlighted it on my Kindle and put a note that I needed to blog about it.  (I love my Kindle!!) It’s that good.  Are you ready for this?  Are you sure?

“I’ve found my beautiful.  And I like my beautiful.  I don’t have to hold my beautiful up to others with a critical eye of judgment.  Like Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, ‘Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.'” ~ Lysa TerKeurst in Made to Crave.

So here’s my question:  What is your beautiful?

Here’s what got me.  So many times I go around thinking that beautiful is something that I’ve seen.  There are places that I have seen that cannot be described as anything but beautiful.  There are other places that I’ve been to that can only be described as anything but beautiful.  Then there are sometimes that those two places that I’ve just described can be the same place.

What that paragraph above reminded me is that beauty is not dependent upon what is in front of me.  And here’s the thing that I forget more times than not.  Beauty, you know the real beauty that is completely undeniable?  The beauty that can be found in the midst of a disaster zone?  The beauty that can be found in the ugliest places in the world?  The beauty that I usually don’t see when I look in the mirror?  Yeah.  Where do we find that kind of beauty?

I’ve always heard the phrase “The beauty of the cross.”  And really when you think about it, there was no actual physical beauty in that scene.  Jesus was up on the cross battered and beaten probably beyond recognition, bloodied and dying a horrible death…and yet it was beautiful.

The beauty part?  He was up there for me.  Because of that, He lives in me.  And because of that I can see beautiful.  I don’t want to settle for pretty or attractive or good-looking.  I want my life to be beautiful not because of the way I look, but because of the way I live.

So let me ask you once again:  What is your beautiful?