I’m going to speak for guys all around the world who love Jesus and love their wives, too. I am not in a good mood.
Hollywood sucks. Media sucks. Our society’s definition of beauty… sucks. No, I mean it. It sucks the life right out of girls and women of all ages, and for what? A fantasy ideal that doesn’t even exist. It makes me furious. Livid beyond words.
I’m an artist of sorts, and the cardinal rule of art is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Not the eye of the media or the smut mogul or the collective hormones of adolescent boys and their older brothers who ought to know better. Beauty is in the eye of the Beholder. Period.
So I reject hollywood’s definition of beauty. Know why? I’m a beholder. I get to decide what beautiful is. That’s my inalienable, God-given right. So here it is: Beautiful is my wife. Beautiful is my daughter. Beautiful is a heart that lives for others.
I refuse—refuse!—to spend my time and energy lusting after an illusion I cannot have. I refuse—refuse!—to hold the ladies I love up to an illusion they can never attain and watch it kill their hearts. I flat-out, categorically, passionately, with every bone in my body and beat of my heart, refuse. Don’t mess with me on this one.
Better yet, I’m going to defer my opinion to a higher one—the highest One—the eye of the true Artist, the ultimate Beholding father and husband and lover, God himself—because through his eyes everyone has beauty if we will just accept his way of seeing. He sees it in the crippled, the maimed, the stained and trampled. He sees it in the rejected, in the lonely, in the wrecked, and in the wrinkled. He sees it in the blemished, the banished, the banal, and the brainy. He sees it in the fat, the failure, the freaks, and the friendless.
He even sees it in the twisted, the selfish, the vain, and the violent. That’s because, astoundingly, every single person on earth has been specially kissed by the sparkle of his divinity, marked by the most beautiful and magnificent Person in the universe. We’re blind as bats with broken sonar, flapping and scratching around in the dark, corrupting God’s image with our clammy fingers. We need to see. We need to SEE!
God, my Father, my Daddy… help me to see.
Help all of us.