I don’t know her at all, but when my ears caught wind of Lupita Nyong’o, it felt like listening to a sister. With all grace, she beautifully spoke about beauty, a truth almost all colored brown by the wise hand of God would resonate easily with. I’ve whispered the same truth myself Reflecting on Racism, but it’s a message that still needs hearing.

We are all different shades of beautiful.

Different sizes of beauty, different hairstyles of beauty, different eye colors of beauty, different ways about us of beauty….

Just like we want to make a god in our image…we want to define beauty in terms we understand, terms that are familiar, so we lift up standards and make up rules about how eyebrows should be shaped and how upper thighs should be sculpted. And we find some poor girl and say there that’s beauty! Heaven help her if she gets pregnant, because out of the mold she goes, or if she treads the earth sans make-up, all will throw her to the wolves and ridicule the beauty we once applauded. The thing about beauty is whether its defined by black skin or white, curvy bodies or straight…all definitions miss THE definition. All definitions skim over the essence of beauty if we skip Jesus, and the world system always skips Him. If we only listen to the magazines screaming at us we turn a blind eye to the Truth about beauty.

The truth is beauty can’t primarily be defined by the shade of one’s skin, though we have mercilessly tried to define it that way in America. Beauty can’t be measured by the size of one’s waist or the height of one’s body. In God, there is measureless beauty. There is light radiating with penetrating brilliance…

And the only real way to become beautiful is for God to live in you.

Unless your flesh of fading beauty is caught up in His beauty, you will without doubt wilt. None of us, not one will be able stand for a lifetime in the narrow definition offered up by the world. And magazines will keep on being produced and all the haters will keep on hating, but we will only bleed from the wounds of that which we allow ourselves to believe.

What makes one quintessentially beautiful is without question Jesus. He is the perfection of beauty shining forth from Zion. What He is, all that He is is beautiful. And if all of us is in Him, beauty will spring up in our hearts indeed.  Don’t we know…you can wear inner beauty on the outside too. And that’s really the only way beauty comes and stays forever…..

You see, beauty doesn’t really shine forth from the covers of polished magazines or pinterest or facebook either, it shines forth from Zion, from above. Beauty etched in the face of our unseen Savior, beauty all the heavens can scarcely mask. He is shining forth, and the beauty most miraculous, the beauty we most want to see is a beautiful soul unfurling in grace.