Humor

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Once Upon A Time, in a land far away, I was a young teenage girl. With my extremely curly hair, I looked like a fading Shirley Temple (rapidly changing into "Chia-Pet" hair), except without the singing and dancing. I wanted straight and silky hair, like the cheerleaders I so admired. I thought if my hair looked like theirs, that I'd become perky and athletic like them. So out came hair rollers the size of Humvees, and flat irons, and Dippity-Doo, to no avail. Regardless of my efforts, trying to look like cheerleaders did nothing to add to my athleticism. I'd been wrong.

In my mid-teen years, teen musical movies were quite popular. A couple of songs, "I Am 16 Going On 17" and "How Lovely To Be A Woman", were sung by young women so spectacularly gorgeous and shapely that I was sure they had to be aliens. I couldn't sing and I wasn't shapely. Yet, I was convinced that on my16th birthday, I would instantly morph into cinematic beauty. I was wrong.

When I was a very young woman, there was a temporarily-famous young model by the name of Twiggy. She accentuated her already-huge eyes by painting in eyelashes on her lower lids and wearing huge false eyelashes. Since I could be easily deceived, I was sure that I had an eyelash deficiency. So I did what she did, thinking that bizarre and freaky makeup would cause others to consider me mature, beautiful, and modern. I was wrong.

As a borderline middle-aged woman, everything I'd eaten in my youth had spontaneously appeared on my hips. I thought that people's eyes would be deflected from the extra pounds of weight if I wore even more pounds of jewelry. Wearing "all-that-glitters" was supposed to make me appear youthful, and and even slender. I was wrong.

I married at the advanced age of 40, having waited for God to give me just the right man. But I still secretly harbored the idea that being a "Mrs." and having that handsome (yet very weird) man on my arm, would cause others to see me as wise and mature. As anyone who knows me today, it's obvious I was VERY wrong!

God certainly knows how to drive home a point. Only after I was married, going to a Bible-teaching church, and beginning to read the Bible regularly, did God point out that He "... sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart." It became apparent that I had spent most of my life actively trying to conform to the world, trying to have the perfect hair, perfect weight, perfect accessories. Instead, God's Word showed me that what I needed to do was allow myself to "be transformed by the renewing of my mind" because His Word is perfect, and He is perfect. All my changes were surface and temporary. God's changes are deep, permanent, and eternal. God is always right!

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