Nancy N. Rue - The Beauty Book

The Beauty Book

Other Books Available in The Lily Series

Fiction
Heres Lily!
Lily Robbins, MD (Medical Dabbler)coming soon!

Nonfiction
The Body Bookcoming soon!

The Beauty Book
2012 Nancy Rue

Published in association with the literary agency of Alive
Communications, Inc., 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200, Colorado Springs,
CO 80920. www.alivecommunications.com

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Tommy Nelson. Tommy Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail SpecialMarkets@ThomasNelson.com.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION, NIV. 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.TM Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

Scripture quotations marked MSG are taken from The Message by Eugene H. Peterson. 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked CEV are taken from the Contemporary English Version. 1991 by the American Bible Society. Used by permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rue, Nancy N.
The beauty book / Nancy Rue.
p . cm. -- (The Lily series)

ISBN 978-1-4003-1948-0 (pbk.)

1. Girls--Religious life--Juvenile literature. 2. Beauty, Personal--Religious aspects--Christianity--Juvenile literature. 3. Body, Human--Religious aspects--Christianity--Juvenile literature. 4. Self-perception in children--Juvenile literature.. 5. Self-perception--Religious aspects--Christianity--Juvenile literature. I. Title.

BV4551.3.R83 2012
248.82--dc23

2012004688

Printed in the United States of America

12 13 14 15 16 QG 6 5 4 3 2 1

www.thomasnelson.com

Contents

One
You Gotta Love It

LORD, you are our Father.
We are the clay, you are the potter;
we are all the work of your hand.

ISAIAH 64:8

You Gotta Love It

Okay, lets get one fact straight right up front: every girl has her own special beauty.

Yeah, I know youve heard your mom say, Well, I think youre beautiful, honey. I also know that doesnt mean a whole bunch when some kids calling you Pizza Face or everybodys telling your sister shes drop-dead gorgeous and then patting you on the head and saying, Youre cute too, honey.

But really, God doesnt make junk. He made each of us just exactly the way He intends us to be. So just like everything else God madefrom blackberries to rhinocerosesyou gotta love it. You gotta love you too.

Yeah, you may ask, but if every girl is beautiful, how come everybody isnt seeing it that way?

Becausebummer!people arent like God. Somewhere along the way, since the whole Adam and Eve thing, somebody decided there was only one way to be a beautiful woman at any given time. Right now that standard is being five foot ten, weighing about a hundred pounds, and having lips as big as the living room couch.

So how are you supposed to convince everybody that youre this knockout even though God shaped you like a fire hydrant or gave you lips the width of a pencil line or gave you curves nobody else has at ten?

You cant. You only need to convince you, and thats what this book is about. By the time you get to the end, I want you to be able to check yourself out when you pass a store window and say, Thats me. Cool! And I love that!

Heres a good way to start. From now until you finish reading this book, try to follow this rule: NO BADMOUTHING THE WAY YOU LOOK.

That means no dwelling on the zits that have appeared on your forehead. No talking about how fat you think you are. No wishing you had curlier hair (or smaller ears or straighter teeth). Pretend you are one of your friends. You would rather eat brussels sprouts than hurt a friends feelings, right? So NO putting your friendyou!down.

Thats a really hard rule to follow, so lets look at some of the things that can keep you from seeing how gorgeous you are.

BEAUTY BLOCKER #1: T V TRAINING

One of the reasons people think theres only one way to be beautiful is because thats all they see on television and in magazines and movies and on the Internet. Even the Barbie dolls seem to scream, You have to look like me! But you dont.

GIRLZ Want to Know

LILY: Those girls on the cover of Seventeen have perfect skin. How do they get that?
They dont. Nobodys skin is that perfect. Everybody has at least the occasional zit, freckle, or scar from when she crashed her bike. Those magazine photos are retouched with computer programs and digital editing software that can remove blemishes (why dont they just call them pimples?), make eyelashes longer, and even chisel in great cheekbones. If you met those models in person, you would see that they have pimples, birthmarks, and little scars too. No lie.

ZOOEY: If I use the shampoos and face creams I see in the ads, will I look the way the models do?
Probably not. For starters, that model isnt you. And dont you think if a company wants to sell a product thats supposed to give you thick, shiny hair, theyre going to pick a model who already has that thick, shiny hair? Besides, if you were born with thin hair, there isnt much in this world thats going to make it thick. But who says you have to have thick hair to be beautiful?

RENI: Im the shrimpiest girl in my whole class. Why does God even make short girls when tall girls are always the ones people think are beautiful?
Actually, peoples ideas of whats beautiful change over time. Back in the late 1500s and early 1600s, plump women with rolls of rosy flesh were considered beautiful, mostly because the better fed you were, the wealthier that meant you were. In the 1950s, lots of curves were the going thing in the movies and on the posters. By todays standards, Marilyn Monroe would have been considered overweight, but men in the fifties drooled over full-figured women. In the 1960s, when the Beatles said on the radio that they preferred petite girls, everybody wanted to be a short little peanut.

Does that mean somebody who