What do you do to be beautiful? If you live in Bangladesh, you head for a cooking fire, find some coal and color all your teeth black. Um . . . what was that? One thing is the same all around the world: Girls want to be pretty. They just go about it different ways in different places. How do you define the word beautiful? Most of the girls in the world have been told what beautiful is. For some, beautiful is stretching your earlobes down to your shoulders. For others, it means slicing their faces or backs and then rubbing salt into the cuts so they bubble into designs. In some parts of Asia, girls smear bleach creams on their faces to make them look whiter. In Thailand, women stack gold rings around their necks more and more until their shoulders have squished down and their heads are stretched high above their bodies. Get this: A certain African group starts their beauty regime around age 20. First, they make a cut in the lower lip so that the lip can be pulled away from the mouth enough to fit a little round clay piece in the hole. In time, the hole gets stretched, and bigger pieces of clay can be put in. I saw a picture of a girl biting into a piece of toast. But it wasn’t toast. It was a huge clay piece stretching her lower lip out! Without the piece in, her lower lip hangs down to the bottom of her chin. She’s the most beautiful girl in her village. Unbelievable, isn’t it? You may be thinking, These people are crazy! Who would go through all that junk just to be pretty to her peers? It’s true that girls around the world do some pretty strange and even harmful stuff just to be beautiful. But let’s not say they’re crazy until we’ve looked at ourselves first. How many Americans have gotten skin cancer from toasting themselves to a crisp on the beach? How many women have died from plastic surgery, being cut to change something they didn’t like about themselves? Think of it a different way. Imagine you’re a foreigner, and you want to know how to be beautiful in America. What would you find out? Paint your face with foundation until it’s all the same, even color. Then paint colors on top of that. If your eyelashes or fingernails aren’t long enough, you can buy fake ones to glue on yourself. If you’re too pale, you can spray paint yourself to be darker. If you don’t like your hair, you can paint it, too! Change your eye color with contacts. Straighten your teeth by wiring them together. Fake face. Fake hair. Fake body. Fake smile. Fake anything you want; that’s how to be beautiful. Um . . . what was that? It’s pretty easy to see how strange other people’s ideas are but hard to see the ones we read about in magazines and watch on TV all the time. THAT is why we SHOULDN'T watch TV (my family doesn't even own one) or look at trash magazines about Hollywood actresses and actors. Who cares who broke up? That is the Devil's handywork, and we should have NOTHING to do with it. Am I saying trying to be beautiful in your culture is a sin? No. Am I saying it can be a sin? Yes. The world is lying to you about what is beautiful. The world is telling you to not accept yourself as God made you to be. The world says you can’t be beautiful if you’re just you. You can’t be pretty until you look like Barbie, like the girls on TV, like a model. Well, here’s the truth: Barbie is plastic, the girls on TV are going to get wrinkles and fat some day and the photos of models are PhotoShopped. The biggest truth of all: You can be beautiful. And you can do it without plastic, without going broke and without spray paint. There’s a culture that has a definition of beauty different from any you’ll find around you. It’s God’s culture, and you’ll find it in the Bible. God has a definition of beauty that will make a girl pretty in every culture in the world. It’s a beauty that radiates from the inside out, and it delights the eyes of God and the lives of the people it touches. “Charm is deceptive,(Don’t trust popularity too much.) and beauty is fleeting; (If your worth is in your looks, your worth won’t last.) but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised.” (Girls who are sold out for God and following His Word are truly beautiful!) There’s nothing wrong with making the effort to be beautiful in your culture. (Well, I don’t know about stretching your neck out.) But don’t believe the world’s lies. Turst in God. Be beautiful. But don’t make the “beautiful” of your culture what it’s all about. Be God’s definition of beautiful! Besides, It’s a lot easier than rubbing coal dust on your teeth.

~Mandy