Beautiful

When someone says the word beautiful, what do you think of?

It’s been about a month since I did a more personal, heartfelt post {other than my health update}, so I thought it was time to do another one. I was debating for a while on what I wanted to discuss, and decided I wanted to talk about something that can sometimes be controversial- beauty. However, this isn’t going to be the traditional take on this subject…I’m going a little deeper than the surface this time around.

When I was younger, I would spend hours upon hours trying out different ways to style my hair, do my make-up and put together outfits. During a few of these sessions, my mom would remind me to be beautiful on the inside, but honestly, as a teenager I didn’t take those words of wisdom to heart. I would see all the magazines, movies and tv shows and compare myself to those people. While on the inside, I was holding in resentment, anger, stress, low self-esteem….things that are NOT beautiful on anyone. I was so focused on outside “beauty”, that I failed to work on beautiful on the inside.

You may be wondering what kind of beauty one could have on the inside. There are SO many qualities I could have listed, but that in itself could be its own post. Here’s a short little list I put together:

When you read this list, does this bring to mind some people in your life? I can think of so many of my friends who fits many, if not all, of these qualities. You see, they WORK on their internal beauty and  it shines through and even translates into physical beauty. When you see someone that is happy, it changes their whole countenance and even their approach on life. That, dear friends, is beautiful.

During this difficult time in my life, there have been health issues that prevented or made it difficult to look beautiful on the outside. Did this discourage me? Absolutely. Then it occurred to me, maybe during this time I could work on becoming more beautiful on the inside instead. I am most definitely a work in progress, but I hope that as time goes on, the beauty on the inside will start to shine forth and radiate on the outside and hopefully also encourage others to pursue the same kind of beauty!

Are there qualities that I didn’t list that you consider beautiful? I’d love to read them! Are there people in your life that you consider beauties on the inside? Feel free to gush about them! We have one life to live, let’s start showcasing that TRUE BEAUTY comes from the INSIDE!