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Beauty and the Beast
While listening to a client’s story the other day, I was reminded of the tale of Beauty and the Beast. The Beast was this hideous character that longed for someone to see beyond his outward appearance to love the true him. And his original glory was not revealed until Beauty offered her true love to him.
Will we believe that we are truly lovable?
And in many ways my client was like this Beast, while rough on the outside, his many sins are not the truest part of who he is. There’s goodness in his heart that few are able to see because he is so rough around the edges. But the beauty and power of love is that it’s able to see the glory that God has given us to reveal even beneath our beastly exterior. And this is not merely sugarcoating reality. Love is able to see the good, the bad, and the ugly of who we are without being swayed by what it sees. But like the beast, and my client, our challenge is often in believing that we are indeed lovable.
Our forgotten glory
All too often we have forgotten the dignity of our humanity, and we’ve come to believe that the beast is who we really are, even when beauty is present, declaring her true love to us. And our “spell” cannot be broken when we refuse to allow ourselves to be truly loved. Sometimes we’re tempted to believe that we’ve just not found the right Beauty yet, and so we may pursue one lover after the next. But the issue in this case is not with Beauty per se, but in knowing and living in the truth of who God has created us to be.
Courageously allowing ourselves to be loved
Certainly beauty helps as his heart to deny the embodied presence of relentless love. All the same, we must remember who we are beneath the beast and courageously allow ourselves to be loved and to reveal the goodness God has given us to reveal.
