“Vanity of Vanities.”
It doesn’t matter what age you are. A young girl looking up to the teenagers or Barbie dolls she plays with, a teen somewhere in the mix of awkward years and school cliques, a college student with the freshman 15 living on pizza and ramen noodles, a new mom always covered in some bodily fluid that’s not your own, a middle age woman finding a new wrinkle, skin tag, or white hair everyday, or a grandma feeling like your slowly becoming irrelevant; struggles with our physical appearance our outward beauty hit everyone. In this book True Beauty, Carolyn Mahaney and her daughter Nicole Whitacre work to break down the lies of our cultural standard of beauty and pull back the veil on what true beauty is.
“What do we spend the most time thinking and talking about? What do we give the most money and effort to gain? Is it glorifying God’s beauty or pursuing glory for our beauty?” These are three questions we should ask ourselves, or better yet three questions Carolyn and Nicole challenge us to think how our friends and family would answer about ourselves.
Not only do we live in a culture obsessed with beauty but, “most of us lack the means to maintain our cultures ideal of beauty, in many cases the standard against which we are measuring ourselves isn’t even real.” Our culture promises that beauty is a key to happiness but that is a lie. This book talks about some of the variances of the standard of beauty through the ages. When skinny was ugly and when people plucked their hairline to achieve the ideal high forehead. It addresses sinful husbands, extended singleness, receiving unkindness because of our looks and losing attractiveness through deterioration of age. This really is a book for all ages.
I have attended countless women’s conferences on “your beauty found in Christ” and “knowing who you are in Christ” etc. I got so frustrated that I told my husband I no longer wanted to go to women’s retreats because the message was always the same… A woman’s identity in Christ. This is a great message in its true form but the message I got was… if I lack confidence or have low self esteem it’s because I am not realizing who I am in Christ. And the inevitable stationary, plaque, or pencil that would have daughter of a king, royalty, destined to become queen etc. written on it to help remind me who I was. In True Beauty these women unpack why the truth that “we are beautiful because we are made in the image of God” doesn’t stick. Why we are constantly having to repeat this over and over to ourselves to try to get it to sink in only for it to have little effect or to give us no confidence in the end. Ultimately it’s not because we need to be reminded of who we are….it’s because we need to focus our eyes on who God is. We are experts in our flaws more than we are experts in Gods beautiful attributes.
We see the verse “I am fearfully and wonderfully made” Psalm 139:14 everywhere. On t-shirts and signs, bumper stickers and notebooks. All to remind us how great we are. But as Carolyn and Nicole point out “we often forget the first half of this verse and thus the whole point: “I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” We are not the focus, God is. Yet we are often glory thieves.
“Low self-esteem is the flip side of vanity they both want attention and approval for how they look. God made us for his glory…not so others would look and say, Oh..isn’t she pretty!” Thankfully this book doesn’t just point out error in our own thinking, it dives deep into what biblical beauty is. “Scripture does not forbid women from making themselves beautiful, in fact it says that women should adorn themselves and it tells them how to do it.” She goes on to say that she does “not bind anyone’s conscience to her opinion” but rather, “reminds us all that our conscience is accountable to the Word of God.”
Follow me through this scenario for a moment… You wake up one day and have found a lump (I’m guessing you already know where this is headed). After testing and biopsies you’re sitting in the Dr’s office and you hear the word cancer. At that moment are you considering what color to paint your nails or if you should change your hair? Are you pondering over how badly you think you need to go shopping for a new capsule wardrobe? No. Your focus has shifted to survival mode. You question the more important things in life and forget the fleeting, temporal things. You aren’t worried about Pinteresting endlessly on how to decorate your home Joanna Gaines fixer upper style. Instead you’re thinking about your soul and your loved ones. In that moment your wrinkles, freckles, or that age speckle no longer matter. So why then do we waste so much of our time thinking on these things and spending our time and resources to achieve what fades into the clutches of old age or is outdated in a year?
“True beauty is to behold and reflect the beauty of God.” This book is more of a ‘what to wear’ than a ‘what not to wear’. Although they touch on just about every angle of the beauty discussion you will not walk away feeling condemned or questioning what to do or where to go from here but rather equipped with scripture and people to go to.
I highly recommend this book to every woman. Are you the college student, teenager, young lady…read this book. Are you one of the older and wiser women who can help train younger women…read it so you might be better equipped to train those that you are a spiritual mother to. Moms read it for yourself, for your daughters, with your daughters. In the back of the book there is a built-in study guide. Work through the 5-7 questions they give for each chapter to help fuel discussion among mother/daughter, your peers, or the ladies in your youth group. Women of all ages should be holding each other accountable to the principles of what God’s word defines as true beauty.