For my class recently, I was challenged to write a paper on appearances. It caused me to ponder what exactly outward beauty is. The world today judges you on how your outside appearance is and what you verbally say. True beauty isn’t what stands on the outside, but what you feel on the inside. We have all heard the saying, “it’s not what’s on the outside that counts, but what’s on the inside.” Yes, we all know what that means, but why do we not believe it? Why do we not stand by what it stands for?
If we meet someone new and we get a poor first impression,
we don’t look at them with as much respect as they deserve. That’s the wrong
way to look at things. Everyone deserves the same respect. Think about how much
respect you want from the people around you. I had a first impression of
someone recently that rubbed me in the wrong way, and I thought of him as
pushy. It turns out that I was completely wrong! He is actually a really nice
person and extremely funny and enjoyable to be around.
This topic has been on my heart for a lengthy amount of time
now and I wish everyone else would take a moment to look at what their words
and actions do to affect the people they encounter. You can make an extreme
impact on someone’s life if you simply reach out to them. Just because someone
looks different than you or doesn’t talk to you first, doesn’t mean that you
should avoid them.
I may be rambling, but I want to drive my purpose hard. Beauty
means "the quality present in a thing or person that gives intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the mind, whether arising from sensory manifestations (as shape, color, sound, etc.), a meaningful design or pattern, or something else (as a personality in which high spiritual qualities are manifest)." Beauty is often defined as something that is pleasing to the eye, in a sense,
but can’t we go even further to say that beauty is beyond what the eye can see?
Go deeper than the surface beauty—go to the very heart of the beauty.
Dig deeper. Don’t judge what you can see on the surface.
Life isn’t here for us to judge what happens day to day, or to judge who or
what we encounter. So instead of jumping to that first conclusion, go deeper
into the matter and find what’s really at the heart. Find the beauty that’s
there. And then make a difference.