PRETTY HURTS

If you know me, you know I'm not one of those Christians who believe the Devil created certain types of music. I don't believe in listening to only Gospel music (as a matter of fact, many of the Gospel songs promote defeatist mentality and law based theology in my opinion).  With that said, I'm sure many of you will not be surprised by the songs that are promoted on MY blog. 

This morning I saw the video to a beautiful song by Beyonce titled "Pretty Hurts". It's such an insightful song and it addresses one of the biggest problems of our day; self image. We live in a world where everybody is insecure about something; how they look, their weight, their skin colour, the tightness of their clothes... you name it. Take a look around- Television, Radio, talk with your friends and see the pictures of celebrities- they are telling you one simple thing; "you are not good enough, you must-do better, be better, sound better, look better" 

This bombardment leads to us putting all our energies into "bettering ourselves". We take classes, we work on our accent, we do cosmetic surgery, we exercise, we lie about our achievements and so on and so forth. But like the song reveals, you cannot heal the wound of your soul with superficial fixes. No amount of surgery will stop you from feeling indequate, unlovable and ugly. It could mask it and you could bury those feelings really deep, but they will still show up either through blatant self loathing or hateful remarks at others. We fail to realise that these people who keep reminding us of our inadequacies are only projecting their feelings of inadequacy to us. They have found out that it is felt by all and are using it to their advantage; to sell products, set trends and be influential. 

Just to be clear, I have nothing against working on your appearance or educating yourself. What I want is for you to ask yourself 

              "Is my qualification, my appearance e.t.c what I look to determine my worth, or have I      come to realise that I'm worthy, valuable, beautiful, lovely, lovable and loved regardless of            these things?" 

Because that's what the Gospel is about, the Gospel tells us of a God who saw as so worthy, so lovely that he became like us in order to save us. He chose to never be without us and made us partakers of divine nature. We don't have to perform to be valuable, we are valuable because we have been made in the image and likeness of the living God. Yes, we fell, we lost sight of that image, we fell short of the Glory of God and ended up with a distorted image of God and of ourselves. But Jesus came and he saved us and restored the image by making sure that "as he is, so are we in this world". That is the cure to the human condition, that is the assurance of our value. Jesus is our answer.

There is so much more to say about this but i'll just let you enjoy the song. I couldn't get a good copy of the video to add to this blog. But you can watch the official video by clicking on this link. God be with you