Does God love....a pretty face? We might as well get that superficial question addressed right now, for Scarlett Johansson, the beautiful and sexy 27 year old actress from New York has been called the “sexiest woman alive” and the “sexiest celebrity" by various magazines in the past 5 years. Even the ever prudish Woody Allen who directed Johansson in several movies called her a “sexually overwhelming, beautiful young woman”. [MILLERWRITES-BLOG-ASIDE: What doesn't Woody Allen find “sexually overwhelming? Just sayin'.]
I believe that God designed and created beauty. While we people may all have varied ideas about what is the most beautiful, whether in the face and form of a person, or in the lighting, shape and color of a landscape or still life, we generally admit that someone else's ideal, while not our own, is still very appealing. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” might best be framed as “the MOST beautiful is in the eye of the beholder. God created all kinds of things to be all kinds of beautiful, for He is beautiful!
Mankind lives in a broken world, however. Nothing is as it was designed to be. Since “the fall”, all of the beauty we know is only a shadow of what it was originally, and considering the corrupting influence of accumulating mutations in the gene pool, I believe that “the beautiful people” among us will only reside in the archives of our ugly descendants. (see my Creationism Examiner article for a tongue in cheek application of this truism) Do you marvel at the beauty of a rugged mountain landscape? Or a craggy shoreline of high broken cliffs? Then you would be downright awestruck, I think, at the incredible original work of creation before it was absolutely wrecked by the cataclysmic world wide flood, and then simply left to drain and recover as best it could.
Back to the question at hand: Does God love a pretty face. Yes, I think so. But does God really care about the outer shell of a person? No, I think not! When Samuel was looking over David's family to anoint the next King of Israel, he was impressed with the good looks and stature of David's brothers, and not with the squat and scrawny David, until he was reminded that “God looks at the heart”. If the heart is the reflection of a person's choices, then God is much more interested in what we do with whatever form of body or face we might happen to have. We may need to care for the body, for the sake of what it contains, but one day we will abandon the old broken vessel and move on.
Sorry Scarlett, for neglecting your story. And I'm sorry for those like you who must deal with so much attention which, unlike God's, is focused somewhere outside the heart. May you live your lives from the heart, and forsake the trap of allowing your good looks to (temporarily) take you places you don't really want to go.
How about if I tell your story in another post?
Good idea? Thanks. I'll do that.
I have to agree with you. While, everyone appreciates beauty, I believe we live in a world so obsessed with physical beauty, we forget what genuine beauty really is... where it comes from. All one must do is look at nature to understand God appreciates beauty. His design is overwhelmingly breathtaking!
ReplyDeleteNice to meet you. :)