Beautiful. Doesn't everyone want to be beautiful? To be valued? To be treasured? We may have different definitions of how that looks exactly, but I think we all want to be beautiful in some way.
There's a song on the radio that says, "You're beautiful. You're beautiful. You were made for so much more than all of this." And it's true. We're there. We've "arrived." We're all beautiful and valued and treasured - whether we realize it or not. Each of us is special and unique.
But knowledge of beauty so easily leads to vanity. There's more to know.
Broken. We are broken. It's the flip side of the same coin. We have all, in our own ways, failed to live up to the Good and the Should. We've seen some hard times and had some struggles. We've tried "our best," but it wasn't enough. We fail to meet our own standards, let alone Perfection.
Beautiful and broken. God sees both. He sees our deep value, the glimmer of His own image. He sees our desperate need, our weakness, our rebellion.
And this is where He meets us. His great love for us compels Him to rescue us from our self-destruction. He gives us the freedom to reject Him, but only He can make us whole and bring us into our full beauty. As a pastor* once said, "God loves you just the way you are. But He loves you too much to let you stay that way."
*The pastor was Cam Huxford, Savannah Christian Church.
