The stars were so spectacular tonight they made me want to cry.

How glorious the world is, even when it's sleeping.

Sometimes my heart longs for adventure. I don't ask for it. I suppose it's just part of my nature. In those times when I look at my bank account and realize I cannot travel a state away, let alone an entire continent, I think positively of the future.

Whether it's five or ten more years, I WILL travel the world, scrounging up whatever extras I have to do so.

That idea makes me smile.

I have learned what it is to feel meager and meek; when I can do nothing but rely on Christ for my hope and happiness, and there, trust that he will bring me through.

For happiness, I've found, is not so much a thing from within us as a thing from up above; without his providence and grace, we miss out on true joy.

Beauty and the Beast

"Without copartner? so to add what wants/In female sex, the more to draw his love,/And render me more equal, and perhaps,/A thing not undesirable..."---Paradise Lost

Since the beginning of time, women have sought affirmation. Somehow, between the first bite of the forbidden fruit and the years that passed since that fateful day, we turn our eyes to the hope that in one moment, we will be fulfilled in our desire to be appreciated and acknowledged. We will be seen as Beautiful.

Culture has sickened us with extensions and colored contacts and diet pills for women too thin and left starving for something more than food already. Sin-fallen men, displaced themselves in their own clockwork mechanisms of lust and lost communication, have made us almost always confused and sometimes bitter. We princesses, who wore tiaras and fluffy pink skirts in our times of innocent childhood, have left behind the hope of becoming queens.

We each deal with our disillusionment in different ways. For some, we shut our hearts to the outside world in hopes that it will fade away from us. The people we trusted to provide us with security in ourselves have long since disappointed us, and we clam up and shut down, hoping that by never being vulnerable, we will be indestructible as well.

Some of us grow harsh and annoyed. We point fingers at society for stealing our childhood ambition to be carried off on a white charger by a confident knight. We blame the abuse in our families, the carelessness of our boyfriends, the anger of our fathers, for our wilted femininity. Like a flower in northern regions which has grown thick and thorny to deal with the snows, we react with harsh indifference to suggestions for softness, and become the brave knights of our dreams instead of depending on one to appear.

Yet, whether we feel weak and insular, or strong, yet lifelessly dependent on our own often mistaken choices, we are all women. We feel within us the lost cry of our citizenship in Eden, and on the winter evenings when we gaze out the window during another long February 14, we wonder if all would be solved with a Love of our own. Then, reminded by ourselves of the cruelty of that dream before, we crush it down once more, hoping by doing so it will finally disappear.

We cannot keep denying our hope. It will always return to us, haunting us with memories and dreams of what could be. To slaughter it may be to kill our vulnerability and the hurt that may follow, but it is also killing the joy we could have had if we would have taken its hand and let it lead us through both pleasure and trial."The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before," C.S. Lewis wrote, "That's the deal."

The Christian life is wrought with such claims. We must take upon the burden of God's commands to learn the truth of them (Matt. 11:29-30). We must be pruned of our sins by God before we produce more in our Christian walk with him (John 15:1-2). We must discard the old self we owned before Christ to accurately 'fill' ourselves with his newness (Mark 2:22). Hebrews 12:11 reminds us, "No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it."

How, then, could we, who for half of our lives have depended upon scorning the stakes in the ground of our heart, look at them instead as guideposts that point us to the truth?

This desire that we feel for admiration and affirmation has followed us wherever we went; yet, every time we supposed we could get it from some source, we have been cruelly deceived. It was how the Serpent convinced Eve to take the first bite, and we have been lead into the same trap. "If you are with him, you will be appreciated." "If you dress this way, you will be noticed by them." "If you shut yourself out from the world, you will finally be satisfied by yourself." It leads us to obsession, depression, bitterness and loneliness; for in everything we seek, we are eventually handed back a blank document.

What is the solution to the dream we desire? What could ever satisfy our hunger?

The spiritual answer would say Christ could; but reality is so much more convoluted than a trite reply like that. We must see why the depth of his presence could fulfill the emptiness that has consumed us for so long.

We must first recognize our worth. To know our own worth is to recognize that the lies society and our lives have paid out to us are wrong. "Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price."(1 Cor. 6:19-20) We were worth enough to God for him to send the Holy Spirit---Christ himself--- to not only pay for our sin-bent souls as a perfectly righteous man himself (Romans 5:7-8), but to make 'his home within us'(John 14:16-17, 23).

If God, who knows our sinfulness yet still chooses to provide us with such a great gift, thinks of us that highly, how could we suppose our worth is anything less?

So we are still queens, though we often don't believe such a thing could be true. Our worth, then, is not tied up in the things that the earth tells us, but in Christ. Apart from that worth, we cannot find satisfaction---our womanhood has been wrapped around our identity in God since the beginning of the world (Genesis 1:27). It was Eve's mistake to think that somehow, her faulty humanity could, by itself, gain entrance into self-godhood (Genesis 3:4).

When we wield such knowledge, we aren't afraid of the world's image of ourselves. As an old hymn says, "Our hope is built on nothing less/Than Jesus' blood and righteousness." Our joy, our completion, our satisfaction is not fractured in the mirror of disillusionment, but instead, rests deeply enough upon the promise of worth in Christ's eyes that it is immovable in the eyes of others. We are finally allowed to realize that this aspect of desire we formerly considered painful is only our womanhood's cry toward running into the arms of he who holds our identity and beauty.

"Who says/Who says you're not perfect?/Who says you're not worth it?"---Selena Gomez

A good friend of mine was there for me recently when I was having a hard day. What a blessing to have such friends to support you.

"Are not there little chapters in everybody's life, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of history?"---Vanity Fair

Curled up in a little concrete creation, reading 'Vanity Fair' for the first time in my life. Thackeray's random thoughts and illustrations on his characters make me wander back to a simpler time, when women could be bright, vivacious, and beautiful without compromising their dignity or sweetness as women, and not pale imitation 'attempers' at being men.