Moody Mosaic Article: What is Beauty?

I wrote this for our schools news paper last month! Enjoy!

What is beauty? Is beauty found in a rose bud? Is beauty found in the stars that we see in the night sky? Is there a true definition for beauty? Different cultures have distinct views of how to define true beauty. For example, in America, there are many different things that a women can wear to present herself as beautiful. A women could use a lengthy floor dress, a fur coat or high heeled shoes. In contrast, in many parts of Africa, women use face painting to express their beauty. In most of the Middle East, women highly value their modesty, so you will often see them displaying their features by wearing long flowing dresses. All these women are defining beauty by their own cultural standards, so forms of elegance can vary drastically.

In the American culture, we define beauty in many different ways. To most teenage girls in our country, something we might define as beautiful may be the way our best friend did her hair that morning or watching the sun rise. Teenage guys might see a giant mountain they can climb or a valley with a long ice blue river flowing down the middle and those things can be a man’s definition of something beautiful. Some people will look at the ocean and think that that must be what is truly beautiful, while others may have the same opinion about canyons or lakes. Everyone is different.

Even God has things that He calls beautiful. God calls a gentle and quiet spirit beautiful, and, we know He loves waterfalls and rainbows and thunderstorms because He created them all.

Unfortunately, culture presents Americans a twisted view of “true beauty.” Thanks to the Bible, believers have some understanding of what beauty is not. Websites can display inappropriate images of men and women and claim that, because God made us all different, we should feel no shame looking at  images of pornography and lusting after other people. Culture also tell us that young ladies walking around wearing virtually nothing is also considered worthy of attention or “beautiful.”

True beauty can take on so many different forms. A person does not need to enjoy all the same things everyone else does. God created all people different, and we all have things we like and do not like. What is true beauty? Does beauty have a single definition? Once you figure it out, does it line up with what the Bible considers beautiful, which is anything pure and noble and right?