Finding Something Beautiful

 My DIL Taylor, called me the other day all excited about some "project" pieces that her parents confiscated from their neighbors throw away pile.  We like to call these freebies future treasures.

They found a cubby for toys and books, 2 end tables for their living room and a bookshelf for their guest room.  All FREE!  AND all needing some TLC(tender loving care).

Tay and her dad spent an afternoon sanding,  gluing, and basically getting them structurally sound.

She loaded them up and brought them to our house and we tackled the cubby.  We primed 2 coats, rolled 2 coats, and polyurethaned 2 light coats.  Then we let them dry for a couple of days.

This past Sunday, Austin and Taylor took their finished project home and yesterday, she put it back together only to discover that her finished project and the extra paint made a few of the shelves hard to reassemble.  (And to our dismay--scratched up a couple of spots of the beautiful white paint job.)

Oops!

For a split second she almost gave in to the need of perfection and put it in the trash pile in front of her yard.

But she didn't.  She overlooked the flaws, placed it in the girls room and voila--it's beautiful even with a few spots shining through.

Finished project

Hailey and I took a nap together after all that painting

This got me to thinking about how easily we discount our beauty.  When we look at ourselves we can easily pick apart what we see.  We look at the size of our clothes, the imperfect abs, the "extra" weight we carry on our hips, or thighs, and the number on the scale as if any one of these, if they were "perfect", would make us beautiful.

Do you know what makes you beautiful?

I do.

You!  You make you beautiful.

Sounds overly simplified doesn't it?

But it's not really.  On the day that the sperm and egg that created you were joined together, you were made in the very image of God.  Genesis 1:27 says this, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."

Y'all--does that just make you want to sit for a little while and take that in?  You, one of 7,714,576,923 people that are alive in the year 2019, were created in the image of  the Creator.

We could stop there-because that is amazing enough, but we won't.

Did you realize that no one else on this planet has your exact fingerprint or DNA?  Go back and look at that number of people alive.  That is a lot of individuality going on around us.  Unless you are an identical twin, there is no one that looks exactly like you either.

Did you know that the patterns of the iris in your eyes, your lips and your tongue are all unique only to you?  No one else has the exact same patterns.

Stop and look at your finger.  Did you know that there is an identification system based on a finger vein scan?  They scan the veins in your finger because no two peoples veins grow in the exact same way and they are individualistic.  This is actually a highly secure method of you prooving your identity.

Our uniqueness makes us beautiful.  There really is no one just like you.

You were created for just this exact time in the history of the world.

You have a great purpose, you are unique, you are created in the image of God.

You are beautiful!

Let that sink in today.

Julie