You don't have to teach a young child what beauty is...she is drawn to it.
Long before our culture warps and redefines what she 'should' find beautiful she discovers it for herself.
Her mother's face, a bird in flight, the soft almost transparent wrinkled skin of a Grandmother.
A Grandfather's knowing loving eyes.
Just like every good and perfect gift God gives us, the enemy of our soul attempts{very successfully} to redefine and contaminate our idea of beauty.
We are willing {even if unknowing} participants because we fail to guard our hearts and minds denying the seductive desensitizing power of what we place before our eyes.
Slowly, and ever so subtly our eyes change. Beauty corrupted, upside down. The enemy has won and we are unaware. We see ourselves and our world through broken eyes, cracked lenses...and we strive to make beauty out of the ashes that we see.
The ashes are an illusion. Beauty is still there if we grab hold of it and turn our eyes away from created things...back to the Creator.
One of the things I love about getting older is that in so many ways as we age {if we mature} all pretenses fall away and we are able to redefine beauty...restore it back to the amazing gift God intended it to be. We get to a point where we recognize the deception and reject it. We get to begin again!
Oh, that it would come sooner...that we'd never lose sight to begin with.
I bought the handful of prints above from an amazing artist on Etsy. I was searching for a Mother's Day gift and ran across these beautiful faces that brought tears to my eyes. To behold such beauty tears at my heart. I had to buy them so I could study them more closely...dream up stories behind these eyes.
