What We're Still Talking About 09: Beauty Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Laura Wifler: Hey friends, Laura here. Welcome to another episode of the Risen Motherhood podcast. Today we have a special show that Emily and I recorded live at the ONE conference at my home church in Iowa. It's always fun to have these conversations—not just behind the mic, but in front of real live women who are facing questions and struggles of their own. In today's show, we are talking all about beauty and physical appearance. As part of the What We're Still Talking About series, we're taking topics that we visited early on in our ministry, and we're aging them up, looking at how the same gospel truths still apply, even if the specific questions we're asking have changed over time.
That's literally what we're focusing on today—aging. Even if wrinkles and gray hair aren't on the forefront of your mind or conversations today, it's probably something that's influencing the way you steward your physical appearance, so stay tuned for that whole conversation. Also, we know it's almost that time of year where you're probably starting to think about holidays and gifts. We know firsthand how hard it can be to find something meaningful, intentional, and lovely for the person you love, but don't worry, we have you covered.
Every year, Risen Motherhood releases a gift guide with specific ideas for yourself, your husband, your mother-in-law, your own mother, your mom friend, and your kids. All the gifts listed are $25 or less. You know we love books here at Risen Motherhood, so we'll have several of our favorites listed, including my new book, Like Me, a picture book for kids about disability. Whatever type of gift or age you're looking for, we probably have something for you. Head to the link in our show notes or visit our website to see our picks. Okay, on to the show.
Laura: Over the years in our motherhood, when we were like spry, young mothers in our twenties, the biggest question was: "Do I wear joggers or jeans today?" Or it was: "What's the best undereye concealer that I can buy?" And you're asking all of your friends to help hide the dark circles. Those were some of the bigger questions we were asking—
Emily Jensen: Like, "How many days can I go without showering before it's too many days?"
Laura: Seven, for sure. You got to train your hair or something like that.
Emily: I think when you first become a mom, it does shake up what you're doing with your physical appearance a little bit. Maybe you don't have as much time anymore to devote to just physical appearance things—brushing your hair, changing your clothes—things like that. Or children are spitting up on you. Your professional clothes—your dry-clean-only things don't fit as well anymore. We really were just thinking about those types of questions, but then we turned thirty-five.
Laura: Dun, dun, dun. It was like we were ten years into motherhood, and a switch flipped, and suddenly it felt like a lot of the conversations that we were having with our mom friends really transitioned from not just, "Hey, how do I not look so tired? I've been up all night with a baby." They started transitioning to like, "How am I not going to look like I'm getting old? How do I look like I'm still young and beautiful and that I care about my appearance and that I'm still worth something?" The questions were starting to change to things like, "How many grays do you count in there, and do you see how the light beacons off of it on the top of my head? Who's the best colorist in town, and how far do I have to drive to get to her?"
Emily: A lot of us in our thirties are of the millennial generation, and you go on TikTok now, and they are making fun of some of our favorite outfits.
Laura: I know. It's so weird to start getting made fun of!
Emily: We love the big sweaters and the leggings and things—
Laura: Hide the tummy.
Emily: But it is becoming a conversation now: "How do you dress like a twenty-five-year-old when you're forty-five? How are we going to keep up with the styles?"
Laura: We have to learn; someone has to teach us.
Emily: I know.
Laura: Then the other thing that started happening was women were hesitantly starting to talk about, "Hey, have you ever thought about Botox? Hey, have you ever thought about a tummy tuck? Have you ever thought about breast augmentation?" Some of these bigger questions started coming up that we hadn't personally really thought of—Emily and myself—but we know that it's becoming more and more common for Botox to be something that women do. Studies now talk about women in their young twenties, because of accessibility and the lower cost of it and even sometimes medicinal benefits—people are saying Botox has become more normalized. Now it's a more normal part of the conversation, where in the past it didn't seem to be a part of it. Things are changing rapidly, and Emily and I are saying, "How do we keep up?"
Emily: All the things that we're really noticing have to do with the pressures that culture puts on us to look young as long as possible. Even though I would say you and I probably don't have aging at the front of mind on a daily basis—I don't get up in the morning worrying about that. You don't. At the same time, I've noticed over the last couple of years that I have changed some things in my routine to keep that in mind. I'm really being careful to wash my face every night now and put on special ointments and creams because I want to not get wrinkles if I don't have to.
I started coloring my hair to cover up those twenty pesky grays or whatever. I did have to stop and think, "Why did I just automatically start doing these things?" Nobody was asking me to, but that was the default that I moved to in my beauty care routine as I'm entering the near-forty stage.
Laura: When we're talking about this aging conversation, and we're talking about microblading and Botox and even just putting on our makeup or how much makeup is okay—I think what we all want as women are the rules. We want to know—okay, I can wear makeup, but if I get a full facelift and totally change my face, that would be too far. Then we want to know in between there—what does God have to say about that? The reality is that there's nothing in Scripture that says, "Thou shall not Botox" or "Thou shall not microblade" or anything like that.
There's no clear prescriptive rules in Scripture. When that happens, what we have to do is say, "Okay, I know there are clear commands in Scriptures. I shouldn't lie. We shouldn't covet. We shouldn't steal. Those are all very clear, explicit commands that God gives us—that all Christians would say, 'Yes, those are true. That's biblically true.'"
When it's not explicit—when we're dealing with more of these gray areas—we have to look at the meta-narrative of Scripture or the overarching principles that God gives us in his Word and say, "Okay, well, how do these principles—the way that I know God works through his story—how do they apply to these everyday moments?" I think for a lot of us, we would say, "Well, if it's not in Scripture, God must not care." The reality is that Scripture really does speak to every moment of our lives and that God really does care about everything that we do. One of those tools that God gives us to help us discover what his plans and his cares are for our lives is our personal conscience.
I wish I had two hands right now, but I'm holding a mic. Essentially, you have the Holy Spirit. If you're not familiar with the personal conscience, I'm going to give you a very high-level overview, and if you want more on this, or you feel like, "Hey, I didn't quite understand," we would encourage you to go back and listen. Personal conscience is a big part of Emily and I's work that we do at Risen Motherhood, and we have tons of more thorough shows on this topic. For our conversation today, here's what you need to understand: your conscience is different than the Holy Spirit. We have the Holy Spirit, as Christians, living in us, and the Holy Spirit is exactly aligned with God's Word every single time. It tells us what exactly right and wrong is. All of us also have our conscience working in us, and that's your own personal sense of what is right or wrong.
The goal of the Christian is to align our personal conscience exactly with the Holy Spirit, but because we're still sinners—we live in a fallen world—it's going to be close, but it's not going to be exact. You're not going to always know exactly what God has for you in that situation. Your personal conscience is really formed by your theology—how you understand what God's work in the world is and what the Bible says—but it's also formed by your upbringing: what your mom did, what your dad did, what your friends currently do, what you're taking in on social media, what your personality is—your tendencies, your giftings—where you work, where you live.
It's formed by all sorts of things that can shift it. Again, if we're aligning those two things, it's close, but it can be a little bit off. Or it could be really far from God's Word. Maybe you've just become a believer, and there is a lot—like Paul, you've got a lot of things to figure out to try to get that in alignment with the Holy Spirit. That is really important, we think, in this conversation and, in particular, cultural norms. Em, you talk about that; you'll do better.
Emily: Okay. Cultural norms. I think as we're talking about aging—we were already getting into this at the beginning of the show. There's a water that we swim in in our culture that says you should not age, and that is informing a lot of decisions that we make. Every day, we all adhere to social, societal norms in the way that we look and the way that we care for our physical appearance. For instance, when I got up this morning, my bun was sticking up all over the place. I had hair falling out the back. I had my husband's socks on. I had on my pajamas.
If I would've just gotten out of bed and come here today looking like that, it would've been very distracting to you guys. It would've been like, "What is going on with Emily? Why does she look like that? Why would she come here in her pajamas?" Potentially, it would even run the risk of becoming the talk of the whole conference—Emily showing up in her pajamas—and not "Here's what I learned in Scripture. I had this great conversation with my friend. I left thinking about this application God has for my life." It would just be a distraction. When we adhere to cultural or societal norms for appearance, it can be a way of showing honor—showing respect.
Paul talks about, when he was ministering the gospel to different people in different places—he would say, "Hey, I become all things to all people." He would maybe change some things that he did or said, depending on who he was with. There's just an element of that—that we're going to do things that are normal to whatever friend group that we're in. Perhaps you've got ten people that you love to follow online, and you just eat up everything they say. Any link that they post, you follow, and any special cream that they use, you buy.
We have to realize how heavily influenced we are by some of those things. But, just like Laura's talking about with the personal conscience and the Holy Spirit, we have to recognize that just because something is normal doesn't make it right, and it doesn't necessarily make it right for us. Our hope in having these conversations—as Laura and I are talking, and we're challenging you guys today—is to stop and say, "Have I thought about this a little bit? Have I thought about what Scripture says? Have I thought about what God might want me to do? Have I thought about how this aligns with his design for my life and beauty?" We can't tell you the answers to those questions. We're still figuring that out for ourselves, but the questioning is the place that it starts.
Laura: We want to just bring you along in our questioning. Again, like Em said at the beginning, our whole posture is very much to come alongside women. It isn't saying we have all the answers. These are just some questions we're asking. We're hopeful that it will serve as fodder for you as you leave today and can think through these things more deeply. Like with most decisions that we face in life, God is more concerned with your heart attitude than he is what you actually end up doing. For some of you in this room, you probably have gone through and done some procedures and done different things, and you are feeling maybe an inkling of guilt or something, but that is not our goal at all today.
We do not want to heap any condemnation or guilt on anyone. The Lord is going to work individually. The Holy Spirit's going to work in you, with your personal conscience, to help show you what is right for you and what is wrong. We want to just remind you that, no matter what and where you walk out of this conversation from, God is gracious and kind, and he loves you. It's far less about what you do, and it's much more about how your heart posture is in the midst of it. Sorry, my voice gave out there.
Emily: Alright, let's dig into some of the questions. The first one is, "Do we believe that older women—grandmas, great-grandmas, aunties, great aunties, older women—still have tremendous purpose and value?" I think it's interesting, because some of us—we've accepted the concept that we're going to age—we know that—but then at the same time, our actions don't show that we're valuing older women in the church. It's like, "Well, why are we so scared of getting old then if we don't think it's a big deal?" I want to kind of dig into that.
Laura: Yes, and just theologically—most of you guys are going to know this—but Genesis 1 and 2 says that God made us women in his image, and he declared it very good. Right from the beginning of time, we know that our bodies are good. At that time, Adam and Eve probably didn't age the way that we do, but we can see that God was intentional with his design. Think of David talking in Psalm 139: "For I am fearfully and wonderfully made." God intentionally chose these eyes, this nose, these lips, the shape and contours of our face, and he said, "That is going to be Laura Wifler. That is going to be Emily Jensen. I have picked those things." It's incredibly important to just remember that there is an intention there and that he has picked and selected those things and said, "That's very good."
Emily: Along with the reality of the design and our image bearing status being what gives us value—not our age, not how trendy we are. It's our image-bearing status that gives us value. Even in a post-fall world, as our bodies are aging—we are headed towards the grave—God still includes older women as an essential part of his church and as an essential part of the kingdom work that's happening there. Of course, the famous passage that most of us know is Titus 2: "Older women are to be training younger women." That's a really beautiful picture. It's a nice, relative, sliding term, but it shows that the grandmothers in the church matter. The great-grandmothers in a church matter.
God thinks that they have wisdom to pour into the younger generation. It's not a bad thing—it's a good thing. In addition, there's verses like Proverbs 16:31 where God says, "Gray hair is glorious." Whether or not that means like literal gray hair, the picture that that's giving is this idea that with age comes wisdom and sanctification, and that is beautiful. That is a great thing. It's not a bad thing. Additionally, we see— and I think this is in Proverbs as well—that beauty and charm are fleeting. Youth is fleeting. You're not going to hang on to it. It tells us that women who fear the Lord are to be praised. There's not an age limit on fearing the Lord. In fact, I think that in God's kind of economy of beauty, the older someone gets, the more perhaps they may fear the Lord—the more they may grow in peace and joy and self-control and patience and Christlikeness.
In some ways, in the church, as you age, if you are walking with Christ, you're becoming more and more and more beautiful, not less and less and less beautiful, like our culture would tell us. I think we have to right that understanding of aging in the kingdom of God and say, "No, I don't have to be like, 'Oh, I'm so worried about getting old. I'm so worried about aging,' but 'Yes, I hope I look that beautiful and Christlike someday.'"
Laura: As we kind of put on that mindset, the next question that we're asking is: "How do our choices and our actions regarding aging show what kind of beauty we value?" There's—I can’t even hardly say it—this really funny quote. I don't know if it's funny or disgusting.
Emily: It’s not funny. It’s terrifying.
Laura: Kim Kardashian, you all. We just have to bring her up into this conversation. Somebody was asking her, "Hey, what would you do—like how extreme or what crazy thing would you do—if you knew that it would make you stay looking young?" She said, and I quote, "I would probably eat poop." She didn't use poop. "I would probably eat poop if someone told me, 'If you eat this bowl of poop every single day, you'll look younger.'" She was pressed on this in a second interview. She doubled down on this quote. She's like, "Yes, I absolutely would do that." I know—it's super disgusting when you think about that—what extremes she would be willing to go to to say, "Yes, I want to look young. I want to keep my youthful beauty."
I think all of us in this room—very easily, collectively—would say, "That is too far. No, that is wrong. You value your youth and your beauty too much. That's not okay." But so often, a lot of the choices and decisions that we are making in our lives, we are not giving a second thought to. We may not be willing to eat poop, but we may be willing to do a lot of things without at least saying, "Hey, am I thinking critically about this?" Just simply because we desire to stay young—it's the water we swim in, like we're talking about.
We've kind of developed some of these litmus tests to help us think, "Okay, I'm going to want to wear makeup this morning," or "Hey, I'm considering something more significant"—how do we determine in our own hearts whether or not that is right for us? Here's some litmus tests we want to go through.
Emily: The first one would be just thinking about how much money we're willing to spend on something. Everyone's financial situation is going to be different. For some people, a procedure is going to be a lot of money—it will be a huge sacrifice. For others, it may just fit into their budget, and it's not even a big thing. It's not even something that they notice. I think as we're considering "How much money am I willing to spend on this?" we have to think about this in terms of our finances. Are we struggling to tithe and struggling to give to missionaries and struggling to be generous, but then we're willing to go into debt for a procedure, or we'll just swipe our credit card for any type of new makeup, or we're spending hundreds of dollars every six weeks to get our hair colored?
Again, we're not saying that's wrong for everyone, but we have to think about, "Hey, what is the fact that I'm willing to do this much—to have this thing to make me look younger—what is that saying about what I really, really care about?" Another one would be time. Time as in: "How much do I spend researching this? How much do I spend thinking about this?" Sometimes there's lead up to an appointment. There's an appointment time, there's recovery afterwards, and then, oh yes, you have to come back every three months until you die or otherwise this will stop working.
If I'm struggling to serve in my church, I'm struggling to find time to read to my kids at night, I'm struggling to find time to do things that God has for sure called me to do, but I have a lot of time to keep these appointments or to invest in my beauty or my anti-aging routine, we have to just evaluate: is something off there?
Laura: Another one is risk. Something like makeup is fairly low risk. You might get a rash if maybe it doesn't jive with your skin, but in general, you can just wipe it off at the end of the day. But something like a larger procedure that you have to go under—you have to receive anesthesia—there's a significant risk compared to something like makeup. Just asking yourself, "Hey, is this a risk that I'm really willing to take? Is this really worth that risk of going under or whatever it might be?" There's also that risk of permanency. I often think about a lot of—even just girlfriends that have tattoos from when they were eighteen. And how many women are running around with tattoos that they now, today, are like, "Hey, I regret that I made that decision at eighteen."
Sometimes I think that can happen if we say, "Hey, I want to change my physical appearance"—and you might love it now, but maybe it doesn't age as well, or maybe it's not something that in thirty years you're going to like, and we can change a lot of things, but you have to continue. Then you go back to time and money, and it becomes this cycle. Just asking and evaluating, "Is that really something that I'm willing to take the risk on?"
Emily: Another question we can ask ourselves is: "How transparent am I willing to be about this?" Sometimes I think even a good litmus test of this is within our church community or our Christian friends specifically. The world—it is getting more and more common to do different things, but if I feel I can't tell my closest two believing friends that love the Lord—if I felt I would be deeply ashamed to tell them that I invested in this thing so that I could stop my wrinkles—well, again, might be wrong, might not be wrong, but that's worth pausing and saying, "Why do I feel I can't share that with people? What's going on there?" Additionally, if there are some people who would say, "Oh, I'm going to do all these things, but I don't want anyone to know I'm doing it because I just want to look like I'm young naturally."
Laura: It's effortless.
Emily: It's effortless. We're not saying the flip side to that is anytime you go get your roots colored, go onto social media and be like, "I just covered all my grays, you all" or whatever. Again, is there a sense of transparency that, "I'm not embarrassed of this. I'm not ashamed of this. Within reason, I can talk about it with other people in my life, and it's not a big deal"?
Laura: Everyone's answers to these are going to be really different. You may be sitting next to someone who comes to totally different answers, and you may both be right, and that's totally okay. I think that it's an interesting spectrum because you can be someone who has a lot of pride and says, "Okay, I have to do all these things to make sure that I look beautiful. I won't go out of the house without makeup. I have to make sure I dye my hair every three months," and all those things, and it's out of a heart of saying, "Because I'm afraid that people will see what I really look like, and I don't want to look old."
But you can also be somebody who does absolutely nothing—makeup free, no hair, just rolls out of bed, like Em was mentioning this morning—and yet also be filled with a heart of pride that says, "Well, I'm totally secure. I don't need that. All those other women are so insecure," and you have a heart of judgment, and you have a heart that says that you are better than other women because you don't need that stuff. There is not necessarily a right answer here. Again, we're looking at those heart motivations.
Emily: Another question we want to ask is, "What would it look like for me to emphasize or invest in eternal beauty and internal beauty in my life?" There is a passage in 1 Peter 3 that I think of when this conversation of internal beauty comes up. Because Peter is talking to different groups of people in the persecuted scattered church in Asia. He's going through, "Hey, husbands, here's what you should do. Children, here's what you should do." He's helping them understand what it would look like to adorn the gospel in their lives.
That word "adorn" means "to make something more beautiful" or "to highlight its beauty." One thing that helps me understand this concept is the idea of a painting. It's absolutely beautiful and gorgeous, and it's going to get hung in a gallery, and so what do you do? You pick out a frame for that painting so that—it just helps so that when somebody's walking through, they don't see the raw edges. The frame that's chosen should seek to draw your eye to the painting itself. If you're going down to the Des Moines Art Museum, and there's a painting from the 1600s, and it has a hot pink frame, when you walk in, your eye is going to go right to that frame, and you're not going to be talking about the picture. You're going to be distracted by the frame.
Again, Peter is trying to help them say, "What things in your life will help draw attention to Christ and the gospel at work in your life?" These are the things he emphasizes for these women. He says it's in your actions and your conduct. It's in the respect that you show. It's in your submission to your own husband. It's in refusing to live in fear and caring well for your own family. He also digs into physical appearance here because these women were showing up, and they had their gold jewelry and their braids and their beautiful garments.
He says, "Look, if you want to adorn the gospel, let it be in the hidden person of the heart with imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is very precious." He's not saying don't ever wear gold jewelry, don't ever braid your hair, but what he's saying is: if you want the type of beauty that God values and that God says is beautiful and precious, it's going to be investing in your relationship with him and displaying Christ.
Laura: The question always becomes—"Okay, well then how do I do that? Or what does that look like?" That's through time spent in prayer, allowing the Holy Spirit to work in your life and listening to his prompting. It's being in the Word. It's serving and pouring out in ministry. It's living life for all things to God's glory. It's interesting to think about how suffering really plays a part, oftentimes, in shaping our souls and making them more beautiful. Oftentimes—even science has proven this. When we go through long seasons of little sleep, stress, burnout—oftentimes those things cause us to actually age faster.
You can get gray sooner. You can get pain in your back and feel like you're walking hunched over. You gain more wrinkles. These things are scientifically proven when people go through hard seasons. That's why the president—you look at a before and after picture after four years, and they look like totally different people because they've gone through so much stress. But in an upside-down kingdom, suffering actually is what makes us even more and more beautiful in our souls. God uses that to change us and to grow us in his likeness. It's just interesting that what is decaying us on the outside on this earth is actually what is renewing us on the inside.
Emily: Another question is just about vanity and thinking about how vanity can be a form of pride. It's really asking that question, "What is my 'why' for preserving my physical beauty?" I think for most of us—if we're being super honest and we're getting really down to the surface—it does go down to an element of just being vain, of having excessive admiration of our own appearance and wanting to look in the mirror and—think of Snow White and the evil queen, and she says, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" She wants to look into that mirror and see herself.
She just loathes with anger that there's someone else that is more beautiful than she is. Is that somewhere in our hearts as we are going through the process of saying, "I don't want to look old. I don't want to get wrinkles. I don't want to age"? How much is that playing a part?
Laura: On the flip side, there is an element that we're made to appreciate beauty and that we can perhaps look at the beauty of a sunset and say, "Wow, that is stunning." We know that that sunset—it's not like you're all praising me for putting that sunset out there. We're praising God. We're recognizing Christ.
But when we look at ourselves in the mirror and we think, "Wow, that is stunning," it's just self-glorification. I didn't even mean that for that to be funny. [Laughter] I think that every morning. Just kidding. It's also interesting to think about how God gives people different measures of beauty too. There is a real reality that some people—even the Bible talks about this with Esther or David—that they were given a measure of beauty.
Everyone around saw that that person is beautiful, but do you know who wasn't beautiful? Jesus. This is not that Jesus from The Chosen. Jesus—I just don't think that's right. [Laughter] The Bible says Jesus was nothing to look upon. What's interesting is that being handsome was not a necessary for Jesus to complete the work that God had for him to do here on earth. I think often we feel like, "Well, I got to be pretty in order to go serve at church. I got to be pretty when I go to school and serve and volunteer in the classroom. I want to look pretty on date night."
Again, those aren't wrong feelings. God designed us to love beauty—to desire beauty—but when we begin to elevate that to a point of wanting our egos stroked and saying, "I am the fairest of them all"—that's when it becomes an idol.
Emily: Because the reality is: who is the fairest of them all? It's Jesus. Really, that's who we are wanting to point people to when they are interacting with us and to realize, "Look—we're not the center of the story. We're not the person that everything is revolving around." We're pointing to the person who everyone should be worshiping and everyone should be glorifying and everyone should be looking to and saying, "Wow, look what he did. He's so amazing. He's so good." We're trying to do things that get out of the way of that and are self-forgetful.
The final question we want to ask here today is: "What does it look like to age well?" Today, we're primarily focusing on the physical appearance aspects of that. There's actually a whole bunch of things to be thought about in this category, but what does it look like to age well, and what type of older woman do I want to be when I'm a grandma—when I'm eighty-five or ninety-five or however long the Lord allows us to live? What do we want to stand when we are that age?
Laura: I think there could be something really beautiful in allowing ourselves to show and display to a world that loves youth and eternity now—to show them that, "Hey, I wasn't actually made for this world. While I'm made for eternity, that's not here and now." Right now, we're in the already-but-not-yet, and we look ahead to a day when we will have perfect bodies. We will have perfect faces, when we won't worry about this at all, but that's not now. The Bible talks about how we are aliens and strangers in this world—that we do things differently. And could it be that allowing some signs of aging, of letting some things take their natural course—could that be a signal to the world of saying, "Hey, this isn't my final home. This isn't where I put my hope. I do look different from other people, and let me tell you, it's because I know that one day, I'm going to meet my king and that all my needs and all my desires and all my wanting for beauty will be completely and utterly fulfilled."
Emily: With that being said, we think the focus isn't on "Okay, so now I can't do any anti-aging things at all," or "I can't do anything to invest in my physical appearance." We can take an extreme either direction. Again, we're not saying those things are wrong, but how are we investing in that eternal relationship with Christ and thinking about the return on that investment? Because—we mentioned this earlier—we are all going to age. We are all going to get the wrinkles anyway. We're all headed for the grave anyway.
There is a sense in which the time that we're pouring into that is just limited in what it can actually do and how long that can actually sustain. We want to be limited in the amount of time we're pouring into that because we frankly don't have ultimate control over that. We can't reverse it or hold it off forever. It's important to evaluate some of those things and be content with wherever we're at in what the Lord has given us.
Laura: Perhaps it is that you want to do those things or feel comfortable, but you can't afford them, or you don't have time to do them. There can be a hundred reasons why we're in the spots that we are. As we close here, we want to challenge you to just think about three to five women that you really admire that are older than you—at least ten, twenty years older than you or more. Why is it that they come to mind? Is it their plump, full lips? Is it their flat foreheads—wrinkle-free foreheads? Truly, it's a question. That's hopefully not your answer for why you admire them. Sometimes I think about it like when my kids were babies, and I looked at them, and I thought, "Oh my gosh, you're just so, so, so cute."
Then you look back on a picture, and you're like, "Oh, they weren't maybe quite as cute as I thought." You had like motherhood eyes, and sometimes I think that can happen with an older woman, and you say, "Yes, they look fine" or whatever. Then as you get to know them and you see their heart, they truly do become more and more even physically beautiful to you as you see their heart and soul.
Emily: You're thinking about how hospitable they are. You're thinking about that wonderful piece of wisdom they gave you that one time when you really needed it. I sometimes think of older women I admire, and I think about how much time they spend praying and how well they know the Lord and, oh man, they just have such a beautiful garden or their cooking skills.
Laura: They're so peaceful.
Emily: Yes, they're so peaceful. Or how faithfully they've walked through suffering, and those are the things I think of. I'm not thinking about how many wrinkles they have. I'm probably not even noticing it. I think a really good recent example of this was when Queen Elizabeth died. I thought it was so interesting that many of the portraits that I saw around the news of her were not of her in the peak of her youth. It was actually the last pictures of her that she had professionally done. We don't look at those images and think, "Ugh, Queen Elizabeth—she's so old."
You think, "Wow, that was an earthly monarch who faithfully fulfilled the duty that God gave her throughout her life." That's how she's remembered, and that's what people are thinking of. They're not commenting about her gray hair. What stands out about her is the kind of woman that she was. That's what people are talking about. I think we'll give that credit to other people, but then when we turn around and think about ourselves, sometimes we're like, "Well, I just want to be as beautiful as possible for as long as possible." We don't realize, like, no, people are noticing other things about you too, and those things matter.
Laura: It really just comes down to a question of—what's going to last? And do your efforts here on earth to stay young, to stay beautiful—are those investments in eternity? It's not to say some of these things that God gives us are good gifts. They are kind things from a loving Father for living in 2022. Some awesome stuff. But where is your hope at, and where are your priorities? I think that as we evaluate what we're doing and the things that we are engaging in and the amount of head space and time that we're committing to these things, it can really show us whether or not we're worshiping ourselves and our own beauty, or we’re worshiping Christ.
Emily: Because ultimately the question is: "Where is my hope found?" Regardless of what I look like. Regardless of how many wrinkles I have, how many grays I have coming in, how tight my forehead is—whatever those things are. My hope isn't found in that. I can like my physical appearance or not really like my physical appearance, but I have Christ. I always have Christ, and it's so encouraging to me. We say this over and over nearly every show: our righteousness is found in him, and he is wonderful and unchanging and our reward. And so, at the end of the day, no matter what happens—no matter what we look like—we have Christ, and that's enough.
