A Different Kind of Beauty

What do we, as women, strive to be? Beautiful for the most part (or beautiful and brains if we could, hehe). Why else are our bathrooms cluttered with hair care, makeup, several types of equipment, etc? 

Rahab was beautiful... and if you're reading Joshua chapter 2 you'll notice she's smart too (hides the spies in her roof and plans ahead for their escape). 

But notice that in Hebrews 11 it mentions her for her faith. Not her beauty not her brains and definitely not by her good works (umm one word ... prostitute). Instead it was by her faith. She had faith that the Lord of the Israelites is the true God.  So the spies had her put a scarlet ribbon on her window so no one would harm her. Just like at the passover! 

But what is faith? 

Hebrews 11:1 states "Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see." 

We all hope in things we dont quite understand or see; so we all have faith in a variety of things. Unfortunately, when we put our hope in other people or stability those things will fail us. If we put hope on ourselves we will fail ourselves (trying to do enough good works to get to heaven...)  Lots of people when they are first married put their hope and trust in their marriage partner and wind up disappointed that they didn't marry the perfect person. It may be even putting your hope on finding happiness in the things or job you want (I raise my hand to most all of these). 

The thing is, we need to put our faith (our hope and assurance) on the very fact that God sent Jesus to be our perfect redemption (our scarlet ribbon/ the blood that redeems us). 

My reminder for myself today is that when people fail me that I'll know that my hope is on Jesus, that my assurance is on His love and that I'd keep focused on the eternal aspect and not so much on my beauty, my brains (or lack thereof), my job or even my husband (love you babe!). So when those things fail me which they all will - I have the hope of eternity. 

I love you all!