We Love Beautiful
I am getting more and more convinced that for us to truly love someone we need to see them as beautiful; to see their beauty, their dignity, their worth, their value. If we do not see beauty in the other I believe we cannot truly love them or even claim that we love them.
I see this at work in relationships all the time. Two people initially see beauty in each other. They see and look for it. They foster it. They cherish it. Then slowly over time due to neglect and wounding, shame and guilt, jealousy and anger, the beauty in the other person fades. They become ugly, distasteful, unwanted. They are still the same person who once was beautiful but are now unlovable in the eyes of the other. Beauty dies. Relationship dies. Love dies.
This explains why a man can be married to the most attractive and “beautiful” woman alive and suddenly beat or leave her. This also explains why a man can be married to the most unattractive and “ugly” woman alive and love her for life. As they say, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, and indeed that is true. It was true with Jesus. For even with him, love and beauty went hand in hand.
How could Jesus love the unlovable? Because he saw a beauty in them that no one else saw. How could Jesus love the untouchable? Because they possessed a worth and dignity that he saw and drew out of them. He would love and heal a leper—those who were deemed ugly by society—because to Jesus they were beautiful and precious. He exclaimed from the cross to his enemies—those killing and hating him—”Forgive them Father for they know not what they do” because he saw even them as beauty enough to forgive. On and on throughout the Gospels you see a Jesus who loved recklessly because he saw beauty and worth in all. Was it them? Was it because they were so lovely? Was it because they felt they were beautiful? No. It was because of Jesus and how he saw reality—how he saw them. And to me, this is the power of the good news.
This is the healing that people discover through Jesus. The leper believed he was beautiful after Jesus declared him as such by touching and healing him. The woman believed she had worth because Jesus accepted her even after knowing all about her vile past and present. The centurion believed Jesus to be the Christ because Jesus declared him forgiven. We step into Jesus’ “beautiful reality” and believe it to be true because of the love he has shown and declared for us. In other words, we believe we have beauty and worth and dignity and value because Jesus says we do and treats us as one who has beauty and worth and dignity and value. Maybe, in part, this is what Jesus had in mind when he said the Kingdom of God is within you.
How can God love all? Because he sees the intrinsic beauty in all mankind…even in the ugliest and most sinful. All have sinned, certainly, but all are loved even more so.
How can we love all? As we begin seeing and fostering and cherishing the beauty in the other, love will flow. Yet as long as we keep seeing the other as ugly and untouchable and not worth our time and despised and our enemy, love will die and cannot flow.
May our hands and mouths let go of our swords and begin healing instead. May our eyes open, our hearts repent, and our ears begin listening to the Father who says, “You love because I first loved you.”
May we listen to God’s voice to our soul that we are worth it, that we are beautiful, that we have dignity in God’s eyes…and may we believe God and allow the truth to set us free.
May we, today, treat and view others as God treats and views them…cherished, loved, beautiful.
May we see others through the eyes of Love, who is God.
May we reclaim reality as God sees it.
May we love beauty, beautifully.
Shalom
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