Cultivate inner beauty
The gentle, gracious kind
That God delights in.
1 Peter 3:4
My friend Steena is “face blind” which means she has extreme difficulty identifying faces. (Prosopagnosia is the medical term.) Steena sees beauty differently than the average person. Her “face blindness” helps her to see inner beauty clearly. Outward appearance in not important to Steena compared to recognizing internal depth, strength, and dignity.
God also evaluates beauty differently than we do. “Men and women look at the face: God looks into the heart” (1Samuel 16:7). God delights in gracious and gentle inner beauty (1 Peter 3:4). Although it takes time and effort to cultivate this type of beauty, everyone has an equal opportunity to be astonishingly beautiful.
“Our physical being is gradually decaying, yet our spiritual being is being renewed day after day …. What can be seen lasts only for a time, but what cannot be seen lasts forever” (2 Corinthians 4:16 & 18).
Beauty that is eternal is not physical.