Grab a dish of ice cream and feel free to read, listen and jot down your own thoughts in a diary or journal.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL

"Worse than telling a lie is spending your whole life staying true to a lie." - Robert Brault

One of the most common lies I hear from the younger customers at the Diary Dairy is, "I'm not beautiful." If I had a penny for every single time I've heard a girl say that to me, I'd be rich. There are many ways to get rich, and that is the worst way. It breaks my heart when I hear girls and boys tear themselves down. Not only is it the most common lie I hear, but it is the worst lie anyone can tell themselves.

As a youth pastor, I try to keep up to date on what the kids at church are reading and watching and listening to. As much as I love to read magazines and watch my favorite television shows, some of the images I see make it so obvious why kids don't see themselves as beautiful. When we see people in the magazines and on the television and movies with their perfectly toned bodies, we think that, since we don't do whatever it takes to make our bodies look so flawless, we're not perfect and flawless ourselves. The thing is, because of makeup and computer editing and eating disorders and alternative lifestyles, those people come across as flawless.

I'm not perfect. I don't have a petite figure like Krista, or an athletic build like Melissa or Carrie, but that's okay. The kids in my youth group, the customers at the Diary Dairy, my family, and my true friends don't think of me as Emily, the Chinese woman with an average body and a little flab here and there. They think of me as a gentle, caring, compassionate, anxious, sensitive person. I may not be as great of a basketball player as Melissa, or as brave and bold as Carrie, but my gifts are found in my writing, the passion I have for my faith, and my ability to be able to talk non-stop about both sports and music. The guys get a kick out of how much I know about football and stats.

The point is, I am most definitely sure that you are beautiful, too, whether you're skinny, heavier than some, white, black, yellow, brown, athletically built or have a wider nose than the kid sitting next to you in class. What makes you beautiful where it matters most is not on the outside, but on the inside. Your friends may have told you that you are kind, sweet, generous, funny, witty, clever, intelligent, gentle, compassionate, or really good at memorizing things. In my honest opinion, that makes you beautiful.

When you lie to yourself over and over, saying that you're ugly or imperfect or insufficient, then you start to live it out by hurting yourself in some way or another, and you were never meant to spend your life hurting yourself or believing you are ugly.

If you need reminded how special and how beautiful you are, and need to hear the truth, I encourage you to spend some time at the Diary Dairy. My co-workers and I would be more than honored to tell you the truth, which is that you are special, beautiful, and loved by someone. Believe it or not, God loves you the way you are, which is how you were meant to be loved: Unconditionally.
~Emily

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