I must confess that when I pass the mirror these days, I find myself startled.  I can’t help it.  It seems strange to see a middle-aged woman looking back at me.  Inside I am the same girl I was 20 years ago.

Unfortunately, the mirror tells another story.

Our culture is in love with youthfulness and beauty.    And if we don’t have it naturally, we can create it with handy software programs or surgeons who can erase all the mistakes we were born with.   We’ve convinced our children that beauty is the prize with mandatory visits to the orthodontist.   When I was young, it was uncool to wear braces.  Now, it is considered a necessity.

Three kids and multiple payment plans later, I feel like my local orthodontist is part of the family.

But what price will this fixation of beauty have on us individually?  Maybe it’s the stranger in the mirror or the fact that I have two beautiful daughters that I realize our fixation with beauty is so unhealthy.  Age comes to all.  There is no escaping it.  What you valued in your youth, may enslave you when you age.

As a follower of Christ, my identity should be wrapped up in who God says I am, not the culture of Hollywood or Madison Ave.

Psalm 139:13-16 says: For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.  I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

It doesn’t feel like girls know that full well anymore. I want my girls to know they are fearfully and wonderfully made.  I worry they see only their inadequacies and compare themselves to a standard of perfection that does not exist.

We are not valuable because we are thin and sexy; or because we are beautiful; or because we wear the coolest styles. And now “shock” has become the new cool for girls.  What can she do to get ALL the attention? Do we understand what a black hole this is?

The real shock will come when one day gravity will take hold of that sexy body and lines will form on that beautiful face.   If this is the standard of their value, then these girls will wake up one day as middle-aged women no longer seeing any value in their lives.  And that makes me mad.

So contrary to popular thought, here are the two reasons we are valuable:

1. God has invested part of his glory and dignity in you. It doesn’t matter how athletic, pretty, skinny, smart, or popular you are or are not; you are priceless. You are an image-bearer. There was a purposeful design in our formation and existence.   Meaning can only be imparted by the Creator.

2.  God has purchased for us the opportunity to know Him again.1 Cor. 6:19-20a says:  Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price.  That price was the life of Jesus Christ.

When you hear voices saying you are worthless, it’s not the truth.  You are an image-bearer given your worth by God when He made you and your redemptive value by Christ when He paid the ultimate price for you with His death.   Not only did He make you, but after you got messed up in sin, He loved you enough to buy you back.  For all the girls who have spent a lifetime searching for someone to love them like this, this should be good news to hear.

Over the years, I have spent great deal of time and money trying to make myself beautiful.  Yet, what I see now is that the time I spent cultivating my identity in Christ was a better investment.  For if I haven’t found myself securely hidden in Christ, the middle-age face in the mirror will be more than I can handle.  But God says our value, purpose, and yes, destiny can only come from Him.

So, mirror, mirror on the wall…I have committed myself to the Creator of us all.  He tells a different story about who I am: though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. (2 Cor. 4:16)  Rather than looking like the latest celebrity star, my heart is to look every day more and more like my Savior and Redeemer until you no longer see a middle-aged, mother of four, but a woman whose heart has been captured by the greatest love of all and His is the reflection mirrored in my face.

And, girls, there is nothing more beautiful than that.