Beautiful

Beauty is really weird.  Have you ever thought about it?  It's super super weird.  Example A.  We wax our eyebrows.  We literally spread hot wax on our faces, stick paper to it, and then right before it cools enough to be stuck to our faces indefinitely, we rip it off.  And why?  Because that's what we have decided is beautiful.  And we draw on our faces.  We literally take "make-up" aka expensive art supplies, and draw on our faces with it like paint on a canvas.  And oh the things we wear!  Don't even get me started on the clothes we put on to "make ourselves look beautiful."  It is just weird.  Seriously.  And I do it too.  I'm not going to pretend like I'm above this weird beauty stuff.  I'm currently wearing an outfit I planned last night, pencil skirt and all, with the same makeup I put on everyday.  It is all about beauty and the way we have defined it.  But where did these definitions even come from?  A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of being a leader on a high school mission trip to Chicago.  Unfortunately during the week I was also, unbeknownst to me, running around with Asthmatic Bronchitis.  Needless to say, I felt really disgusting and not at all beautiful.  But one day at the bus stop a woman asked me about the group.  I told her about the work we had been doing and that I was a leader on the trip.  Her response was, "That is absolutely beautiful.  You are beautiful people."  Whaaaat?  Beautiful?  Me?  The one whose lungs feel like they are made of lead, who is sweating through her t-shirt at the bus stop while her eyes water from allergy overload?  As if that wasn't enough to stop me in my tracks, the woman then went on to talk about her work at a nursing home.  As an African American woman she said she faces discrimination daily from the elderly who lived in a time where racial discrimination was the norm.  But, and I quote, "No matter what, once I get to know the people, I always find that they truly are beautiful."  Here is a woman who faces blatant discrimination and yet can still find the beauty being masked by it.  Isn't that just amazing?  And it is so difficult to do.  To realize that literally everyone is beautiful.  Especially when we think of those we don't particularly like, of those who disagree with us, or even of criminals.  I'm not saying we should be ok with people discriminating or doing crimes.  That is not at all ok.  But I think sometimes it is hard to think of them as people too.  And to realize that there is probably something beautiful about them.  If we could really get to know people and see them for who they are and not what they wear, how they look, their race, religion, sexuality, ethnicity, financial class, wouldn't the world be a lot more... beautiful?