If You Can't See Your Beauty...

Not long ago, I shared the following photo on Facebook:

People who were wiser than I was did some fact-checking and discovered that, with their compound eyes, butterflies can, in fact, see their own wings, though probably not from an angle or with a level of self-awareness that would allow them to appreciate their own beauty, so the idea still kind of works.

The odds are pretty good that you see at least a little bit of your own beauty. You may have been told what others see in you and you might have thought "You might have a point, if not for X, Y, and Z." You see the traits that make you beautiful, but you don't see the beauty yourself.

Just as with the butterflies, it's a matter of perspective, and I'm not sure how much we can do to improve our perspective in this case. Butterflies can't grow eye-stalks to look at their wings from a better angle, and even if they could, I'm not sure their own beauty would impress them. Like the butterflies, we might never be able to fully recognize our own beauty.

Rather than trying to look at our own wings to judge how beautiful we are, we should recognize that we are not the best judges of our own beauty. Neither are other butterflies, who may either call us beautiful because they see in us a beauty that they can't see in themselves, or may call us ugly because they're jealous of our beauty. Rather than judging our value by our own flawed perspective or by the words of those we don't trust to be honest, we should judge our beauty by the opinion of the One who is always completely honest and whose perspective is perfect.

We may not be able to see our own beauty, and others might not see it either, but God does. No matter what the world thinks of you, and no matter what you think of yourself, God knows how beautiful you are, inside and out. So, instead of asking our peers or our reflections whether we have value or not, we should ask the One who knows us best and loves us enough to be honest with us. He can tell us how precious we are in His eyes. You may not believe that you're beautiful, and you may not believe it when others tell you you are, but I hope that you'll believe it when you hear it coming from Him. You are beautiful. If you don't believe me, ask Him.