Beautiful...

She walked rapidly across the parking lot, her bare hands pulling her worn wool-blend coat around her in an effort to fight the bitter wind. A brown faux leather pocketbook dangled from her left arm and a faded limp cloth flower bobbed on her lapel with each hurried step she took.

Her dish-water-blond hair was pulled up from her face in a scraggly pony tail, a scrunchy held it in place but not too well. The strands of hair that had escaped flew wildly around her pale plain face. Her sad eyes were downcast and there were dark circles under them. She looked tired. She was worn. And she didn't know she was beautiful.

As she got in to her non-descript white early model car she was probably thinking of the errands she needed to run, the laundry that needed to be done and the dust bunnies under the bed. All work that waited for her day in and day out in a never ending cycle of chores and tasks with no time for fun, no time for romance.

She longed for it though. A time to be in the spotlight. A time when her husband would look over from the television and smile at her. To recognize her. To tell her she is pretty. She wanted to know that she was loved and appreciated. But it never came. Oh she was sure her husband loved her and that her kids needed her but there was something more she needed. She needed to know that she was special even if it was in some small way.

As she drove along thoughts returned to her that she had pushed away long ago. The thought that there was more to this life than chores. She had heard stories about women like her. Plain women who became princesses and even queens. "What about Cinderella?" she wondered. But no, Cinderella was beautiful under all that soot, wasn't she? She tired of this line of thinking and turned on the radio for some distraction. She turned the tuner knob to find a station with some lively music to listen to...something to shake off the funk. As she scanned the air-waves with her right hand and drove with her left she heard the baritone voice of the announcer say "You are beautiful!" surprised that she would hear that particular phrase at this particular moment she glanced quickly down at the radio dial wondering if she had stumbled on to a radio serial program, perhaps an infomercial about facial products but then...in the next breath the announcer said..."I created you. I thought about you since the beginning of time. You are My rare gem. There is no one like you in all the earth." She pulled the car into a parking lot as the tears streamed down her face and parked. She wanted to hear the rest of this story...one that had coincidentally mirrored her questions. She had to see how it ended. Who was the announcer speaking too?

"You, woman, are My crowning glory. The one I created to nurture the earth. My heart that beats physically among the rest. My beauty in physical form." She was looking at the radio...tears flowing freely down her cheeks...waiting, wondering when the station break would occur and she would learn what she was listening to but it never did because she then remembered that her radio was broken. Way down in the center of her being, the walls around her heart began to crumble and fall away as she began to understand that God was the Announcer...speaking to her heart, telling her He had created her just the way she was for a purpose.

As the walls fell, so did the weariness of her life. And as she sat in her beat up car, in a parking lot in town, in the biting cold, she began to bloom as a radiant smile lit up her face in the realization that she was loved...she mattered...and because of Him...she was beautiful.