Beauty for Ashes

The father’s strong hands gently capture the little one’s dark chin stained with her humble tears. He raises her head just enough to see her own reflection in His eyes.

“How can I possibly believe that beautiful woman is me? God, can that possibly be me?”

I tried and strived and cried all my life because I thought I was ugly. After all from the time I was a youth I’d been told I wasn’t pretty. I was convinced. I believed it. So I covered up, ashamed lest anyone would see the dark skin and short hair and assume the interior was just as undesirable. A child with theatre and music and poetry in her heart. A soul that adored beauty itself and longed for it all around her. This child was convinced that it was something she’d never posses. Its reminiscent of the bard Countee Cullen’s anguished cry:

“…yet do I marvel at this one thing. To make a poet black and bid him sing.”

What I really wanted was for someone to look into my eyes and even if they couldn’t see the beauty in my physical appearance, I wanted them to see my soul. And if they should find any beauty there. Anything of value and substance. That they would believe that it truly is me. It truly is real. And that it truly is a glimpse of what God created me to be.

Not a façade or a masquerade mask intentionally, deceptively trying to hide some hideous interior. Not some strategic smoke screen or a subtly spun web created by some scheming spider to seduce an unwitting victim. No, that kind of beauty is gaudy, superficial and fleeting; offensive. Like the brash lights of the sinful desert in comparison to the humble natural beauty of a starlit sky.

Rather, pure beauty - the kind that is not skin-deep - can only be bartered for mountains of ashes. This kind of beauty takes the breath away and at its most humble state can reach the heart of the most callous, most jaded. It becomes one with the bearer. It flows like a peaceful river from the depths of the soul and cannot be separated from the being without exacting blood, tendons, and nerve fibers. It shines deep in the innermost chambers of the heart and spills forth at times of the least effort—in a candid, vulnerable moment—a word, a gentle caress, a tender smile. So unexpected, so unrehearsed so honest, that the act becomes a vivid, transparent a sketch, a tableau of a beautiful soul.

That’s what I’ve asked You for. What You’ve promised me. And now that me is finally finding the light of day. Finally feeling the sun on her skin and the wind in her braids. That me is finally discovering her reflection in the calm river of her soul. Every trial that lied and said that she wasn’t loved, every tear that seemed to confirm what they said about her, lo and behold they were the catalyst that caused the transformation. They were the vehicle that turned the vision into the evidence of things not seen.

What I’ve found is that it takes great courage, great strength to be that soft, that vulnerable. But still I pray to You for the courage and the strength to do it. I want to be the woman You created me to be. I long to stop trying and crying and striving and just sit back and allow You to flow through me.

Seeing a glimpse of a strikingly breathtaking woman that God showed a little dark-skinned, broken girl She stands looking at the reflection, and realizing that it was her own reflection all along. So different from the lies, so deceitful were the tears.