BEAUTY

My wife was grading a science test at home that she had given to her elementary-school class and was reading some of the results to me. The subject was "The Human Body," and the first question was: "Name one of the major functions of the skin."  One child wrote: "To keep people who look at you from throwing up."  

Contributed by Sam Jarrett, Reader's Digest.

The renowned Quaker scholar Rufus Jones was speaking of the importance of having a radiant countenance. After his address, a woman "with an almost unbelievably plain face" came up and asked him what he would do if he had a face like hers. He replied, "While I have troubles of my own of that kind, I've discovered that if you light it up from within, any old face you have is good enough." 

Our Daily Bread, December 7, 1992.

Charles William Eliot (1834-1926), former president of Harvard University, had a birthmark on his face that bothered him greatly. As a young man, he was told that surgeons could do nothing to remove it. Someone described that moment as "the dark hour of his soul."  Eliot's mother gave him this helpful advice: "My son, it is not possible for you to get rid of that hardship...But it is possible for you, with God's help, to grow a mind and soul so big that people will forget to look at your face." 

Our Daily Bread, June 15, 1992.

An ad appeared in a newspaper that read: "Farmer wants to marry woman, 35, with tractor. Send picture of tractor."

Source Unknown.

The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is the reason he made so many of them. 

A. Lincoln.

It was absolutely amazing. I was in West Afraca--Timbuktu to be exact--and the missionaries were telling me that in that culture the larger the women were the more beautiful they were thought to be. In fact, a young missionary who had a small, trim wife said that the nationals had told him she was a bad reflection on him-- he obviously was not providing well enough for her. A proverb in that part of Africa says that if your wife is on a camel and the camel cannot stand up, your wife is truly beautiful. 

J. Stowell, Fan The Flame, Moody, 1986, p. 119.