"Beauty is on the inside." We know it's true . . . yet sometimes it seems tough to fully believe it. What would your world be like if you truly felt beautiful and lived every day full of that confidence and joy? Fashion journalist Lauren Scruggs knows how it feels to search for beauty. She grew up knowing of God's love, but never fully understood what that love meant, or how it extended to the deepest parts of her soul--until a horrible accident that resulted in the loss of both her left eye and hand. In her darkest hours, everything Lauren believed was tested. Yet it was there that God showed her where real beauty comes from: the unfailing love of the Creator. God's love is what truly makes us lovely.Using stories from Lauren's accident, recovery, and experiences in the fashion world, "Your Beautiful Heart" explores issues that teen girls face every day: body image, self-worth, peer pressure, and much more. Whether you read the book on your own or with a group of friends, Lauren's personal message of love, faith, and value will show you what it means to be a girl who radiates with true beauty.
My Review
After the brief introduction into the author's background I was nervous the book was going to be 31 chapters on different angles on her one accident, but I was pleasantly surprised. She dove into her experiences and fears as well as reaching out to others for stories that we could all relate to. I loved that each chapter had a real-life struggle which she would connect to a certain passage of scripture. That scripture would relate how God tells us to face that certain struggle and finally each chapter ended with a sort of action statement that summed up the chapter lessons. That was my favorite part because now I have written down each chapter's action statement and will be able to recall the passages that went with them as well as the people that had suffered and overcome each struggle.
The author seems extremely humble and ready to offer herself and be vulnerable through her writing and struggles, so I was in turn open from the beginning and ready to absorb the messages she was giving. She seems like a strong, beautiful woman who I strive to be like. This book brought up an important point that I need to remember that having beauty does not equal fullness. An excerpt I enjoyed:
"A gigantic problem in our world and in ourselves is that we don't see that beauty and fullness go together. Beauty plus full: You have both parts to get to beautiful. Our culture and our hearts seem convinced that beauty equals fullness. We behave as if the two words mean the same things. Even worse, we behave as if the shallowest and most fleeting kind of beauty, a person's appearance, guarantees fullness. Our obsession with the mirror and our near-constant, pit-of-the-stomach, I'm-never-pretty-enough feelings prove this. But feeling even deeply, despairingly displeased about our appearance doesn't actually say anything about our looks. It doesn't actually prove we're not pretty. What it says instead is that inside each one of us, we ache for something. We believe that a pleasing physical appearance can take that ache away. In other words, we have a cosmic emptiness, and we've bought into the idea that being "good-looking" is what will fill us. It won't. It can't."