Skin-Deep Maturity

The same day the news announced “Katrina Leaves Dozens Dead,” my server’s news rotated this headline as an equivalent top story: “How did Jessica, Denise and Others Get So Slim and Fit? See Their Secrets.”

Think maybe our culture has messed-up priorities?

Want more evidence? Americans spend more than $8 billion annually on cosmetic surgery. But it’s not just this side of the Atlantic where we’re forking over cash. The Scotsman reports that four in ten teenage girls in the UK consider plastic surgery.

And how about this? His-and-hers and mother-daughter treatments are among the latest plastic-surgery trends. People are giving such treatments as gifts. What are we teaching our girls? And what does one write on the gift card? “You have too many wrinkles, so here’s help”?

The average cost of a nose job is more than $4,000; the average cost of fixing the upper and lower eyelids is about the same. Hmm, let’s see—support a pastor in the developing world for three years or lose the crow’s feet. That is such a tough moral choice….

Not long ago I was talking with my friend Dr. Dorian Coover-Cox. She had spoken with someone who told her how women who live in Dallas’s equivalent to 90210 simply cannot exist there without having facelifts. It’s considered downright shameful in the Neighborhood of the Beautiful to have bodily “imperfections,” and money is no object when it comes to altering one’s externals. Dr. Coover-Cox pondered aloud whether the makeover-fever mentality was the sort of thinking the apostle Peter had in mind when he wrote this:

Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as braided hair and the wearing of gold jewelry and fine clothes. Instead, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight (1 Peter 3:3-4).

Dr. Coover-Cox told me, “I often think of the following saying: ‘If a woman isn’t pretty when she is twenty, it’s not her fault, but if she isn’t beautiful by the time she’s fifty, it is her fault.’ I first overheard this as a girl attending a fiftieth wedding anniversary reception. The woman whose anniversary was being celebrated was far past age fifty. Pictures of the couple sat here and there, and I recognized her immediately as a perfect illustration of the truth of the saying. She was beautiful.”

Peter doesn’t prohibit women from looking nice. The adornment is what women “add” to what God gave us—in Peter’s day,  braids, gold, and expensive duds. Then as now women were tempted to preen. Yet the mark of a Christ-follower must be the embodiment—literally—of a different standard. Could it be that the presence of crow’s feet indicates maturity on more than one level?