A Deeper Beauty

Owen Strachan:

Let me put this very clearly: if, however unwittingly and unintentionally, I ever give my little girl the impression that her worth is found in her looks, beauty, and hotness, tie a millstone around my neck. I can’t ever teach my son the American myth that he’s valuable only if he’s a three-sport, twelve-letter athlete who doesn’t stagger after a concussion, and I can’t ever teach my daughter that she’s valuable only if men covet her and lust after her.

Perhaps I am revving at high RPMs here, but really, I can’t think of much else that I could do that would more harm my little girl, or children who are under my ministry.

We dads love our little girls. They are unspeakably precious to us. God has saved us from Satan’s deception regarding women. We cannot value them, as lost men just like us do, because of their figure and their prettiness. We’re not blind to beauty, and as they grow up we likely won’t teach our little girls some sort of “paper-bag” version of their body. We don’t at all want girls to feel any shame about being distinctly womanly. It was God’s mind, not Hugh Hefner’s, that came up with manly and womanly attractiveness. We’re not ashamed about that; we’re not prudes; we should carefully but honestly help our daughters see their womanliness as a gift of God, not anything else. If they grow up to be attractive, we’ll help them appropriately handle that, and we’ll even train them to see their own beauty as reflective of the One who is beauty.

His beauty, though visually stunning, is of course preeminently spiritual. It is the beauty of holiness, the apex of beauty.

In all this teaching, we guard our little girls. We show them that though a sinful world claws at them to define themselves physically, we will never do so. We cannot do so. Their worth is in their embodiment of God’s image. Their worth is, hopefully, in their union with Jesus Christ. We love them dearly, and we fathers will walk through fire and rain to help our little girls, but their worth is not actually found in us. It’s in God, and his good work in them.

That, my friends, is language worth repeating, over and over and over again.

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