What is beauty anyway? It’s said that inner beauty is more important than outer beauty.  It is but that’s so easy to say. What does it mean? 

It’s much easier to see apparent outer beauty.  We see it and we judge it because we see it.  The desire to look beautiful on the outside is drawing, so we’re drawn to create it-real or perceived. So if I’m being honest, maybe just with myself; I think we all care a little more about how we appear. We focus on looks and how we seem to be.

We think about what kind of person we are, based on how we’re coming across. Maybe we admit, how things appear is a big part of life. Especially now that social media tends to portray an outer beauty that is staged and meant to look as if it’s normal and natural. It’s meant to not look like a setup, which it is.

It’s a hard comparison to take when I’m tired and my hair is crazy.  When I’ve got 4 kids running around in pajamas from yesterday and they are hungry, looking for food and I haven't showered yet.  I see your picture of a perfectly made up mom wearing beautiful lipstick.  You have a tidy kitchen, kids dressed in clean button down shirts and a picture perfect breakfast prepared the night before with the recipe attached. The 2 kids eat without complaints as they smile at each other while dad kisses them goodbye on his way to work. 

I look again at my kids; one is crying, one just spilled sugar filled cereal all over the counter cause he got it himself.  I smile because he got raspberries to go with it… ahhh something healthy!  Then I look and see a raspberry squashed into my barstool seat along with cereal crumbs and milk running along the seams of the seat and onto the floor, mixing just a little with the raspberry giving a tinge of red as it permeates the leg of the stool and drips to the floor. 

In my picture there’s no dad to kiss us goodbye.  I’m working from home in my jammies because somebody’s gotta bring home a paycheck while mom stays home. Then I think, oh…. That’s me too.  I take it all in and sigh… good gracious, this is not what appears as picture perfect beauty like that picture I see on my feed.  What surrounds me is my reality, that is not staged.  I see it as beautiful though and I think I'm beautiful in this reality. 

Exterior beauty is expanded when interior beauty shines through the exterior.  Exterior beauty is diminished when interior beauty is not cultivated.  If only our young people could understand this. How the world would be different, especially in this social media age where everything seems to revolve around what shows up on the outside.

Imagine the transformation that would occur if the truth about how attractiveness really works could be revealed?  Being attractive isn’t attractiveness.  Attractiveness is ATTRACTION.  Being attractive is not about the clothes you wear, the makeup and accessories in the clean kitchen with perfect breakfast and staged smiles.  Being attractive is knowing how to attract. 

The clothes and clean surroundings, they are beautiful too. It’s true that all those things can definitely contribute to and enhance attractiveness.  And that’s also the lie in that truth.  That isn’t what attractive is.  It’s only a possible symptom of it, or it’s a cover up.  So, it’s also a lie that can help make it true.  You can create surroundings that are what you want even if you’re not there yet.  It’s all about what you want to be and if you’re truly what you’re becoming. 

See, if you don’t cultivate that inner beauty, all the beautiful clothes, makeup and clean surroundings won’t make you attractive.  They can make you appear to “look good” but you can’t be beautiful unless it is the expression of what’s real.  Then and only then, the outside adornment can expand that beauty into the kind of attractiveness that is jaw dropping. 

The draw you begin to command is when you walk into a room and everyone stops to stare. It’s not because of how you look, but who you are.  People feel it.  That’s when the beauty on the outside enhances the true beauty on the inside. And it expands to be so large it is felt from far away. That’s attractive.  That attracts.  It’s real attraction.

As I was growing up, I thought I had to be beautiful, so I spent the money on the clothes, the makeup and the shoes, because I wasn’t inherently beautiful.  I needed to add it to myself, then, I could be beautiful.  Then I got in my parents car and it was old and I didn't think it was cool.  It made me not beautiful. 

I begged them for something that looked good. That wasn’t a priority for our family budget.  No.  So even with my nice new clothes and shoes and make up and cool friends, I didn’t have a cool car, so now I wasn’t beautiful anymore.  Dang!  That sucked and I felt it.  I didn’t feel beautiful and when people came around I was quiet and didn’t feel confident, because I was looking for the outside to create me.  It didn’t.  

Now I know.  I know how real and true beauty is created and it’s done through the heart.  When your heart is broken, your beauty has the chance to be born for the first time or if there is beauty already born there, it gets bigger and brighter.  The other option is that it breaks and dies just like your heart. 

As I begin to see the contrast in all the choices we can make in this life, I’m seeing the truth in how beauty is created.  I see how the beauty of who you are expands so fully, the beauty of what you create is on the outside.  When that inner you, that’s beautiful, shows up powerfully in who you are, everything starts to look beautiful.  It’s not because of what you believe or what you wear, but who you are. 

At that point, anything you do on the outside to enhance your God given beauty, whether that is great or small, becomes more attractive. Your beauty becomes expansive. It attracts all the beautiful in all things. As you create more of that beauty, more beautiful is attracted to you.  Another aspect of this too, is that the things that are ugly are pushed away from you.  You may have once thought they were beautiful, but as your beauty expands so too does your standard.

 Sometimes things that you once thought were beautiful and no longer are, must be removed.  That can sometimes feel like an extraction from your life.  It can look a lot of different ways.  It can hurt to lose things, even if they’re not part of who you are anymore. You’re not changing though, you’re transforming. 

The cycle goes on and that’s how you create a beautiful life from the inside to the outside.  Even when it’s not perfect and there is pain and the things that happen may not look beautiful; there is always beauty to be created and expanded upon.  It just depends on what you put your energy into expanding.  For me, now I see how to create beauty in myself by being a being of beauty.  I am beautiful inside and out simply because I fill myself with love and then share it.  That’s how beauty is created. 

Now I can drive a beautiful car or an old ugly one.  Doesn’t matter.  I’m still beautiful.  I can wear old clothes or new ones, and I’m beautiful either way.  I know my value and I know myself.  I don’t need those things that are new and beautiful to be beautiful.  As I’ve grown in the knowledge of what is beautiful, the most beautiful things seem to be attracted to me and more beauty comes into my space.  I’ve found the secret and it’s been inside me all along, I just had to transform it into attractiveness.