The Stories Beauty Tells

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." We’ve all heard it, but who really gets to decide what is beautiful?

I recently heard someone say that a face without wrinkles is an untrustworthy face. That the crow’s feet by your eyes reveal a life filled with joy and laughter. That the deep vertical lines between your brows might tell of frustration or sorrow. But what about the hours spent squinting into the sun or the way your whole face moves when you tell a story? Every line is a mark of experience—proof that we have lived.

The long horizontal creases on a forehead? They whisper of innocence and wonder, perhaps even the kind of naivety that believes everything it hears.

Story. Scars. A curiosity and an open door into the world we would have never known had we not asked.

There is beauty in everything.

In the cracks of the sidewalk that hold tiny patches of green. In the dried-up rose—nearly black now—that you saved from your first date.

In the scars on your knees from falling off your bike.Even in the surgical scars from the night your appendix almost burst.

Every mark carries a story, revealing buried treasure—love, joy, pain, resilience, growth. Somewhere along the way, we stopped embracing what is. We started covering, fixing, erasing. But who convinced us that these “imperfections” were flaws? That broken things should be hidden?

Nobody gets to decide what beauty is for you. What moves one person may not move another, and that is the freedom of perception. But we don’t have the power to take beauty away—not from others, and certainly not from ourselves.

So what is beauty? And who gets to say?

Only God.

He created you, and He called you good. No—very good.

"God saw all that He had made, and it was very good." —Genesis 1:31

He wove rhythm and time into our existence. He designed age and value, growth and scars—not to be concealed under a basket, but placed high, like a lamp on a stand, for the world to see.

You were never meant to be hidden.

So let them see. Let them see the laugh lines, the scars, the healed-over wounds that tell the truth of a life fully lived. Let them see the beauty of becoming.

What stories does beauty tell in your life?