Beauty from Unlikely Places

"Women who are stunningly beautiful are women who have had their hearts enlarged by suffering.

Living in true beauty can require much waiting, much time, much tenacity of spirit. We must constantly direct our gazes toward the face of God, even in the presence of longing and sorrow.

It is in the waiting that our hearts are enlarged. The waiting does not diminish us.

God does not always rescue us out of a painful season. You know that He does not always give to us what we so desperately want when we want it.

He is after something much more valuable than our happiness. Much more substantive than our health.

He is restoring and growing in us an eternal weight of glory.

And sometimes... it hurts."

---Stasi Eldredge

II Corinthians 4: 16-18 (AMP)

" Therefore we do not become discouraged (utterly spiritless, exhausted, and wearied out through fear). Though our outer man is [progressively] decaying and wasting away, yet our inner self is being [progressively] renewed day after day.

For our light, momentary affliction (this slight distress of the passing hour) is ever more and more abundantly preparing and producing and achieving for us an everlasting weight of glory [beyond all measure, excessively surpassing all comparisons and all calculations, a vast and transcendent glory and blessedness never to cease!],

Since we consider and look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are visible are temporal (brief and fleeting), but the things that are invisible are deathless and everlasting."