We hear the saying all the time “Beauty is skin deep.” Now what does that mean? If you were reading the statement beauty is skin deep your first thought would probably be that if you’re not pretty or handsome you somehow have less value than people who are more attractive. Though we all know this isn’t true there are some superficial people in the world who actually feel this way but everybody’s beautiful in their own way.
There are several ways that a person can look at the statement beauty is only skin deep. One being that the outward appearance is the only thing that counts (which would be taking it literally, that beauty doesn’t go further than the skin) and another meaning that beauty is something that is somewhat of an illusion or in other words something that’s superficial and fleeting. Just because a person is beautiful on the outside doesn’t mean they will be beautiful on the inside. They could have the most unattractive personality. That’s not to say that people who are a little less attractive have the best personalities either, depends on each individual. You just have to take a look inside to see what’s there. A lot of people who are not as attractive typically do have really great personalities more so than those who are more attractive. My explanation for this is simply because beautiful people sometimes feel that their beauty will carry them in all aspects of life so they have a tendency to not work so hard on the inward stuff and developing their personality. They rely too heavily on their looks to get them through life. A free ride so to speak. For people who know they are not as attractive, they take the time to develop themselves in other ways to make themselves more appealing and therefore create more personal assets aside from the superficial stuff like beauty. If you look a little deeper you will find beauty beyond what’s on the outside. Because we have our minds set and trained on what the standard of beauty is, sometimes we find difficulty in seeing past that outer shell which will eventually fade away as we age. We have to learn to look beyond what is in front of us. Don’t judge a book by it’s cover. People should be judged by their character, not their looks. Now I’m not at all saying that beauty is not important. Beauty is one of God’s creations. It’s a wonderful thing! And of course you definitely want to have someone in your life that you are dating or married to who is as equally attractive as you are because it’s important to have an equal partner in the area of intellect, looks, financial status, spirituality, etc. but of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You just don’t want to be the kind of person who constantly judges people based on their looks and picks their friends based on status as far as outward things like looks and material things because you never know what kind of inward beauty you are missing out on all because you didn’t take the time to get to know someone.
Everybody has their own definition of beauty. There is a standard of beauty in our country with specifics and partiality to nose sizes, eye shape/color, hair type, face shape, and the overall body proportion. It is said that there is a Universal definition of beauty. What that means is that there is some scientific theory of Divine Proportion. Divine Proportion advocates that everything in the universe is based on the proportion 1 to 1.618. Someone took the time to study numerous things in the world in art, architecture, advertisement, music, birds, flowers, and even the human body and discovered a Divine Proportion law that is consistent in everything. Don’t know if this is particularly true or not but hmmm…something worth studying because it’s very accurate. For example, regarding the human body, each succeeding finger bone is 1.618 the length of the preceding finger bone. This theory also states that all beautiful faces regardless of race, age, and sex, conform to the Divine Proportion. When you really think about it, how many times have we thought after looking at someone with a huge nose or crooked teeth, humongous oversized lips or elf like ears have we thought to ourselves or even said out loud…wow that’s an ugly person right there. That’s not such a nice statement to make, but even if you see a wilted flower or some other things in art, fashion, clothing, etc. out of proportion or not quite right according that standard of “beauty” we don’t really find it appealing do we? Well I say beauty is ONLY skin deep or superficial.
When I was a little girl, somewhere during my early teen years from the age of 13 and throughout my adolescent years, I had this nagging thought that because I was pretty, which I was often told by people quite often, I would somehow have a horrific accident of some kind that would steal my beauty. Either through a car accident or some other type of tragic incident. This is a thought that developed after years of experiencing jealousy from various people in my life. I never could understand why it was so hard for females to give another female a simple compliment about their hair or clothes or something so simple as “those shoes are really cute.” I never had a problem giving compliments. But I guess when an individual is lacking in a certain area and desires something that another person possesses, human nature is to be envious or jealous. Fortunately I never experienced any of this from classmates. Maybe because I had classmates who were just as pretty, talented, smart and confident and secure enough within themselves to not have to be jealous or envious in that way, I don’t know. Anyway somehow, (not exactly sure when) these negative twisted thoughts got planted in my mind as a child and since at that time I did not have the tools to be able to dispel these thoughts that were in my head, they lingered and affected my relationships in a negative way because what began to happen was, I became a people pleaser. I even went so far as to try to downplay my gifts and talents so as not to “outshine” others that I was around. This is a dangerous thing because you end up losing yourself and allowing people to manipulate you. I knew these thoughts were wrong and of an evil nature. Although I didn’t have the tools to know how to dispel the thoughts, what I did possess was the ability to pray. So I took my concerns to God in prayer and asked Him to deliver me from these thoughts. The things that we cannot do on our own and don’t have the power or knowledge to do, God does intervene in our lives to bring about the desired and necessary changes. And if we ask Him to give us the knowledge and wisdom, He will also do that as well. Fortunately, I was delivered from those horrible thoughts of losing my beauty and finally realized after snapping out of this disillusionment that God blessed me with beauty and talent and it is something I should never be made to be ashamed of or made to feel guilty about expressing. Why in the world would I think that because I possessed beauty, something that is God-given to begin with ‘mind you, that I would be punished for it? This is somewhat similar to the emotional trauma that a woman who has been stripped of her virginity and/or personal security goes through from the awful experience of being raped or taken advantage of by a man. Of course the two experiences can’t be compared, but what I mean by this is that there is a mindset and a little bit of emotional turmoil happening on the inside that strips a person from the freedom to be who they are because another person has taken a piece of that away. When you have people who hate on you for being talented, smart, pretty, handsome…they are basically telling you “I want what you have and you don’t deserve it.” Who are you to be talented, smart, pretty, handsome?
I remember listening to a story on TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Network) in which Mandisa from American Idol was being interviewed by a christian talk show host regarding her new album after her experience on American Idol. She shared a story about something that she experienced when she was younger that caused her to get to the weight that she was at when she appeared on American Idol. She was raped as a young child and ever since that experience she became an emotional eater because of it. What she didn’t realize until just a few years ago was that there was a connection between her emotional eating and the rape incident. It wasn’t until she sought God about specific things in her life that it was revealed to her that what she was doing by emotional eating was creating a physical shield or wall so to speak by allowing herself to get heavy and overweight. The weight was a protection of some sort. The emotional aspect of the rape experience caused her to subconsciously think that if she was beautiful and attractive, she would be an easy target for men to harm and hurt her. This is where I compare her experience from an emotional aspect to mine. Even something as simple as people hating on you can cause a person to develop emotional issues that subconsciously cause them to want to hide a part of themselves so as not to become the point of attack.
Everybody handles their pain and tragedy in life differently. Some people become prone to alcoholism, some drug addiction, some choose food as their comfort to help them cope with life struggles which also leads to addiction, and some choose to smoke. Food addiction is usually chosen because it is safer than drugs and alcohol and the individual feels that since it doesn’t harm others or affect other people’s lives the way alcohol and drugs do it’s not as bad. But actually food addiction has it’s own harmful consequences that spill over to other areas of our lives and affect the people around us because we are not really taking care of ourselves. And when we are not taking care of ourselves, we are not able to take care of the important people in our lives in a positive way, like our children and give to them or our spouse our best self. It’s amazing the thoughts that our subconscious mind thinks without us even realizing that those thoughts are there. Our mind is so powerful that the human brain can think a different thought every 1.2 seconds. Our mind is thinking 86,400 seconds in a 24 hr day. The human brain has been compared to a computer. Wow!! So, you see why there can be sooo many things going on (on a subconscious level) that you are not even aware of unless you get to the root of the problem and try to figure out why you are displaying symptoms (Ex. drinking excessively, getting high, overeating, shopping excessively and overspending, sexual addictions, etc.). This is the reason why the bible tells us to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. If you could understand the way your brain and mind works and how much of a powerful tool it is, to allow us to think, create, problem solve, etc., you would be able to see, understand, and respect the importance of renewing your mind daily. Let me give an example of this: since our brains are likened to a computer processor, the same way that our computer gets clogged with information and starts to slow down because of broken or fragmented computer files from constant activities like deletion, rewriting of files, or resizing, it requires defragmenting to undo what has been broken which helps the computer processes to speed up and get back to normal speed. We have thousands of thoughts per day. Most of the time these thoughts are a large percentage of the time negative and we do not monitor what we are thinking. Sometimes it’s very hard to monitor your thoughts if you haven’t learned to control and train them. It is possible to train your brain. We have a tendency to think that we have no power or control over our thoughts but that is far from the truth. Thinking is a process that is influenced by outside stimuli and also inside stimuli such as our nervous system and the neurons and hormones that regulate brain activity. Although we get many of our thoughts from many different outside sources, that doesn’t mean that we can’t control how long these thoughts stay inside our heads. We can choose to focus on a thought or choose to eliminate it so that it doesn’t become a part of our inner beliefs or storage system. If you are told you are stupid and accept that thought that was verbalized to you by someone else, (accepting it by choosing to believe it and furthermore focusing and meditating on it continuously day in and day out) then it becomes part of your belief system. You’ve allowed a negative thought to be stored in your subconscious data file to be accessed over and over again thereby causing you to react outwardly or express this negative thought in various ways through your behavior. It’s like a tape or movie being stuck on repeat and playing over and over. How do we react outwardly? Overeating to comfort ourselves when these negative thought reappear in our mind. Drinking excessively even to the point of alcoholism because we have thoughts that we are not even aware of that randomly pop into our heads at any given moment that make us feel emotions like anger, fear, sadness, inferiority, or insignificant. If you were to monitor your thoughts throughout the day, you would be shocked at the number of negative, non-supportive thoughts that run through your mind. And if your hormones are out of whack and out of balance (which influence our thoughts as well) then you really have a larger percent of uncontrollable thoughts that are hard to get a handle on. This spills over into anxiety attacks and other stress related issues. What is a computer monitor for? So that you can see what information is in the CPU or processor. Imagine not having a monitor and just placing your software into the processor to receive data. You wouldn’t have any idea what was being put into it nor have a way to access the information and control any potential negative data that may have been placed on your hard drive.
I would compare the process of defragmenting a computer to reading a book, particularly the Good book or the bible. What defragmenting does is take computer files that are broken or fragmented and fixes the broken files. This is why reading is very important. Not only reading regular books but most importantly the bible which is the knowledge of truth written by man but inspired by God. Hebrews 4:12 states: For the word of God is quick and powerful and sharper than any two edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. When we read, it is like taking software and placing it in a computer’s hard drive for the computer to access and read the data. When we read the word of God it is similar to defragmenting your computer. The word of God will clean up your mind and do the work that needs to be done to correct things that have been stored in your mind. This is why you hear people talk about the mindset. Mindset is a way of thinking, whether wrong or right, that creates a person’s belief system. Not only is reading important and crucial to mental health but receiving positive, life-enriching information through not only your eye-gate, but the ear-gate too, is something that you must monitor as well (the music you listen to and the environment you choose to dwell in – people you choose to hang around).
Computers process information that is stored on a disc or dvd and stores it for future reference to be accessed when needed. If we don’t read and fill our brains (which is our storage device) with positive things, we allow ourselves to be continuously bombarded with negative outside stimuli that gets stored in our subconscious because we neglect to monitor it. Let’s defragment what unintentionally goes into our storage think tanks by reading positive books, listening to positive music and dvds, meditating on positive things, exercising positive self-talk, and renewing our minds through the word of God daily. Lest we, like our computers, get sluggish from all of the junk that clogs up our thinking and potentially spills over into other areas of our lives.
If you are a person who struggles with your weight, maybe you are an emotional eater and don’t know why you can’t “stick to your eating program” and “exercise more will power”, there are reasons behind all of it that you will be able to understand once you can successfully get to the root problem. The eating, smoking, drinking, or whatever other behavior you take part in to try and self-medicate is only a symptom of a deeply rooted problem that needs to be addressed. Let’s not focus on what’s on the outside more than what is on the inside for what’s on the inside is really what matters the most. Take the time to invest in yourself and as you do you will begin to see your health (mental and physical health), your weight, and your life become better and more in balance and in tune with who you were meant to be. Make an investment in YOU!!
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