Beauty

So I recently finished reading Stephanie Nielson's book, Heaven is Here. Stephanie Nielson and her husband Christian were in an airplane crash in 2008. Stephanie burned 80% of her body and Christian 30%. They were both in a coma for months and Stephanie was on the verge of death many times. 

I first heard about all this while I was at BYU participating in the recapturing beauty 10 day challenge, which aims to help women see their true beauty. Each day, they gave a task to help women see themselves for who they really were. Here is a link to the 10 day challenge if any of you are interested.

I mention this because at the end of the 10 day challenge, Stephanie Nielson came to speak at BYU. (You can watch the speech here - I highly recommend it!). I didn't really know what to expect as I didn't know her story very well yet. However, she gave such a moving speech about her experiences and how the accident has dramatically affected her life. 80% of her body was burned - and the flames did not spare her face. After the accident, she was barely recognizable. Both in the speech and in her book, she describes how hard it was to accept her new self and her new body. She no longer had flawless skin, it was burned. 

The thing that amazes me is that she was able to accept her new self, her new image. Her body does not look the same, it cannot do the same things it did before, but she can still live life to it's fullest. She can look in the mirror and be ok with what she sees. Can we? 

I am definitely guilty of this, but it seems to be so easy to nit-pick at the way we look/dress and get discouraged when we are not perfect. We are all beautiful. Modeling agencies would see my freckles as flaws and be itching to cover them up. I see them as sun kisses. It doesn't matter what the world thinks of us. It is not our looks that make us happy, it is the way we live.

"Sometimes people are beautiful.
Not in looks.
Not in what they say.
Just in what they are."
Markus Zusak