Keeping Beauty at Arms Length

So today I noticed that most people have one arm or leg that is longer than the other. It was all the observing I could do this morning as I waddled behind other working Chicagoans as we mass exited our trains like penguins and headed to our respective office buildings.

My mind usually takes a good few hours after waking up to process anything remotely productive, so I apologize if this realization misses the blogosphere benchmark of intellectual thought.

Upon first recognizing this distinct feature about most of my fellow human beings, my initial reaction, I confess to you, was annoyance. What kind of person has mismatched arms? Please don’t take me for pretentious. A gentlemen at a shoe store recently pointed out to me that my feet are in fact two different sizes altogether. I share in this shortcoming with each of you, and your struggle is my struggle. I digress.

After my initial annoyance, my mind went elsewhere. I began to think about how the average person spends a few years at a time in life trying to rid themselves of some feature that they dislike about their chemical make up, be it their weight, their eyebrows, their receding hairline, or their crooked or corn yellow-stained teeth.

We look at our airbrushed, spray tanned, fake boobed Hollywood utopian kings and queens as reminders that we are flawed, broken, and incomplete specimens of a failed God, or a natural selection that we cannot naturally compete with.

The funny thing about it all is that it is actually they whom all look alike, who come from the same cookie-cutter mold, and whose limbs are so unnaturally and disgustingly perfect that they look as if their creator (or whoever recreated them) had actually very little creativity. Their souls have been simplified to magazine articles, paparazzi videos, and the characters and art they portray on movie screens and I-Pods.

I started to think- maybe we’re the ones that are beautiful. Maybe we with our unique body builds, eye and hair colors, teeth that point in different directions, are the ones with the creative designer.

Maybe our stylist had such an endless depth of beauty and creativity about Him that Hollywood America had no where to go but backwards.

As I concluded this epiphany that took all of about 1 minute to work through in my head, I began counting the unique features in myself and those around me on my walk, things that no one else could claim as a generic feature, but rather a prototype.

I concluded that Hollywood is boring, and that my occasional love handles and bad hair days reflect a God Who never runs out of creative designs and Who doesn’t see beauty as utopia but rather as unlimited possibilities.