Day Fourteen: ABANDONING THE WORLD


“No servant can serve two masters;
for either he will hate the one and love the other,
or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other.”
—LUKE 16:13

If you feel a little uneasy talking about beauty and spirituality, that’s okay. There is an unnatural, uneasy relationship in our society between the two. In biblical days, it was easier to understand the symbolism of caring for the body in relationship to the state of your spirit. Before you could worship, you had to ceremonially wash yourself. Applying oil and perfume was a sign of blessing, an anointing that often meant much more than mere grooming. You were preparing to go into God’s holy presence, the temple’s sacred ground. To prepare the body was to prepare to meet God.

What do you think of today as you prepare your body in the mornings, even on the mornings you prepare for church? I think about wrinkles, cellulite, pore size, plump lips, and expertly lined eyes. I’m preparing for someone, but is it God? Truthfully, I want to greet the world and know that it approves of my appearance. I want to please God and the world. But this journey I’ve been on has pushed me to continually choose between the two desires. For as much as we talk about tolerance in our culture, there is no middle ground when it comes to our spiritual lives: we can’t tolerate competing spiritual desires.

If we want to discover the beauty that God created in us, we have to be willing to abandon the world’s definition of beauty. We have to believe, by faith, that we have something more: a beauty that cannot be fully seen by human eyes.

Ask: Show me how preparing myself to greet the world is really a preparation to meet You.

Believe: I prepare myself in the expectation of seeing God’s love today.

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