From the time I was a little girl, I resolved upon three desires: to marry a poor man, to be in ministry together, and to have brown eyes. My family and friends might exclaim, “What about Montana and Wyoming?!” I’ve spent close to three decades saying I will move there when I’m grown up, and I still dream of one day having property and horses. Suffice it to say for now that I’ll use “desires” for the things I believed would happen and “dream” for the things I hoped would happen. So, I always desired three things for my life: a poor husband, ministry, and brown eyes.
Brown eyes? It’s true! I wanted brown eyes. Indulge me for a few moments while I digress. I remember walking with one of my parents when I was 7-8 years old. We talked about Matthew 17:20 – faith like a mustard seed. That verse was very straightforward to me. I believe: God acts. Cause: effect. I didn’t even have to believe a lot. I could just believe with the little bit of belief I had, and God would answer my prayers. I practiced it. (Or should I say tested?) I remember spotting a mountain and silently saying to God, “Move that mountain into the ocean!” Yeah...not much happened. I didn’t give up, though. I tried a few more times. Despite being quite young, I had the intellectual capacity to analyze the situation. My childlike mind concluded that if God had moved the mountain, people may have lost their homes or died by falling off the mountain, or by being squished or drowned, as God carried it from the land to the sea. (I was a kid, okay!)
Back to the brown eyes. I love brown eyes – always have, always will. Dark, chocolate eyes, like deep pools of mystery: warm, tender, ethereal, a tad pensive. When I was around the same age as the “mustard seed walk,” I read an Amy Carmichael biography. Amy was my hero. She left family, home, culture, all that was familiar and safe, to go rescue children – and she never looked back. Oh yeah, and she had brown eyes. Brown eyes that she wished were blue. This fact stumbled me for years. Why would anyone born with the ultimate physical blessing question God’s grace on her life?
I shared something with Amy. I prayed about my eyes, too, although my prayers were a bit different. Channeling that good old mustard seed, I prayed, begged, bartered and pleaded with God to change my eye color to brown. I remember going to bed at night, and in all serious contemplation and devotion to faith in God’s ability to do anything He put His mind to, I prayed for brown eyes. The next morning, I ran to the bathroom, excited to see the answer to His prayer. Cause: effect. That lasted the first couple mornings… For me, giving up did not equate acceptance, however. Changing my eye color was not like moving a mountain. I could comprehend negative results from moving a mountain; conversely, changing my eyes would only produce benefits. Thus, this prayer was simple (God could do anything), backed by more faith than a mustard seed (I literally expected to see brown eyes the next morning), and absolutely not harmful to anyone (unlike squishing or drowning people). After numerous unfulfilled prayers, I resigned myself to the fact that either God didn’t hear me, or He didn’t care about making me beautiful. A resonating bitterness implanted itself in my heart, burgeoning in the dark recesses of self-disgust and insecurities.
By the time I was 15 years old, I had long ceased praying for brown eyes. I had also long begun abhorring my reflection in the mirror. One day I stood in front of the mirror brushing my hair. I vaguely recall some sort of difficulty in getting my fine-textured, stick-straight hair to do what I wanted. As I surveyed my reflection, bright bluish eyes stared back at me. My heart could take no more, and a deeply rooted volcano of bitterness erupted: with all my strength I screamed, “I HATE you!” and threw my hairbrush at the mirror. The aftermath left me trembling. My lesser fear was that my parents may have heard me and I would be called upon to explain a very uncharacteristic screaming and throwing of objects at a breakable surface. (Which, by the way, I was quite lucky did not shatter…) Still, something greater took my breath away. A quiet, steady voice.
“Would you rather be blind?”
Maybe I was only 15, but my soul recognized that this was no rhetorical question from my Creator. God was making me an offer. If my countenance was truly so revolting that I could no longer bear to gaze upon my reflection, then God would answer my prayers. He would change me. He would blind me to that which I hated.
I remain humbled by God’s grace in that moment. He didn’t have to make me an offer. He didn’t have to let me choose thankfulness. He was under no obligation to provide continued eyesight to an ungrateful daughter who reviled His creation. Maybe my story didn’t explain that enough: I literally, from within the marrow of my form, detested that which a holy, magnificent God had perfectly designed before conception and then woven together with love and precision in my mother’s womb, followed by an unremitting devotion to my physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual well-being as I passed from infancy to young adulthood. In that moment in front of the mirror, I responded to God’s offer with a promise to never again complain about my eye color. (A promise, I am happy to say, that I have kept.)
Kept promises as they are – and humbled though I remain – my journey from self-hatred to acceptance, and from acceptance to pleasure in adapting to God’s perception of beauty, remains long and, at times, strenuous. But God is faithful and generous. A couple years after the mirror incident, I was preparing for a missions trip to Mexico with a group of teenagers led by YWAM staff. We participated in YWAM Salem’s NIKO program (a leadership training program) before heading south. One of the team leaders gave me a Bible verse during a night of “debriefing” around the evening fire. I can’t find a translation that matches how I memorized the verse, so I’ll share my memory along with 3 of the 7 translations I looked up.
The verse was Song of Solomon 4:7. I memorized it as, “You are entirely beautiful, my love, and in you there is no blemish.” The English Standard Version reads, “You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you.” The NASB comes a little closer with, “You are altogether beautiful, my darling, and there is no blemish in you.” Or, there’s a more modern interpretation in the form of the New Living Translation: “You are so beautiful, my beloved, so perfect in every way.” Most other translations that I looked at used the word “fair” instead of “beautiful” and exchanged “flaw” and “blemish” for “spot.” Regardless of the translation, the intention of the verse is evident. From the core of her person radiating throughout her external form, the object of the compliment exudes a perfect beauty incomparable to any other form and untainted by insufficiencies.
One could certainly pursue theological interpretations of this verse. We could discuss how it prophesies salvation. We could strip the verse down to metaphors and similes from a literary criticism perspective. We could approach the verse from an archaeological or anthropological viewpoint, dissecting the cultural significances and nuances. Historical research would shed light on context by using the actual figures on which the literary story is based. We could sociologically assign meanings to the gender and class statuses of the characters in accordance with the context. But in the end, this verse is very simple. A lover says to his beloved, “I love YOU.” He sees beyond the shape and perceives the essence.
There’s no way Luba Iliyn could have known my history and prescribed a verse accordingly. My parents, siblings, closest friends – none have heard this story. The book is not exactly written for single, teenage boys and girls, so Luba had no logical cause for picking a verse from that book out of the dozens available. She was open to the Holy Spirit’s guidance and shared with me a verse she believed God had given her specifically for me. Admittedly, I felt somewhat uncomfortable with a verse from Song of Solomon…considering Solomon was, in my opinion, something of a pervert. (Did he seriously need that many women?? C’mon…and don’t give me the historiographic explanation of treaty brides. I’m a history major – I know something of the ancient world. And no man needed 1,000 women.)
The verse didn’t really settle in my heart until 2-3 years ago. I spent a decade accepting my need to be thankful for the health God gave me (such as perfect eyesight), contrasting my blessings with the struggles others had to live through each day. And, gradually, my perception of beauty has evolved, growing steadily in line with that of my Creator’s. This task has been somewhat hard considering that my life has turned out far differently from my childhood image of perfection. I’m not married. I’m not in ministry. I don’t have brown eyes. I’m not even living in Montana! I think if members of the church at large would acknowledge a subliminal message that gets disseminated from the pulpit and most married couples, we would realize that we consider marriage the culmination of maturity; we portray marriage as the hallmark of a complete life. We emphasize marriage as evidence of beauty. When someone is single, we ask why as if a single person must provide a good explanation for not being whole. Many operate on the assumption that a life lived fully for Christ automatically means marriage, babies, and death at a ripe old age surrounded by grandkids and great-grandkids.
Maybe that’s not God’s perception of beauty. I mean, certainly He perceives marriage and children as a beautiful component in a human’s life. But maybe He perceives Beauty as something larger than our limited expectations, desires, hopes, and dreams can imagine. Maybe the human assumption that the product of beauty is marriage belies the true Beauty He proffers: a living, thriving relationship with the Alpha and Omega. A timeless romance with El-Shaddai.
My vocabulary has changed a bit since childhood. For instance, I might trade the adjective “poor” for a more suitable one – “humble” – to describe the quality of man I’d want to marry. For the most part, though, I’m the same girl I used to be. I fear wealth and its arrogant assurances of self-reliance and sustainability. I detest the idea of living a meaningless life of earning money to spend on myself and pay bills I probably shouldn’t have in the first place. I still love brown eyes. And I still need the Creator’s reassurance that I am completely beautiful just as I am when who and what I am is rooted in Him. That reassurance, ironically enough, has taken an amusing form over the last several years. For some reason, the one compliment I receive routinely is about…my eyes! At 15, I never could’ve imagined that!
I wouldn’t trade this lesson about true beauty for the life I could easily have borne (and saddled others with) had I not been saved for something greater by a God whose love shielded me from too early a fulfillment of those desires my heart held since childhood. The desires are not evil. Quite the opposite: they’re pure and natural. Rather, having discovered the indescribable comfort in Song of Solomon 4:7, the postponement of fulfilled desires has lent me peace in knowing that one day, should I find that humble man, or that right ministry, for whom or which I have been designed, I will be able to function as a spiritually, emotionally and psychologically complete individual whose identity was molded by a gentle Creator who craves communion with His children: a Creator who meets His child in a place that is entirely beautiful.
