Troy P Zehnder

I have come to the conclusion that nobody is happy. The person with curly hair wants straight hair. The person with straight hair wants curly hair. The blonde wants to be brunette. The brunette wants to be blonde. The person with blue eyes wants brown eyes. The person with brown eyes wants blue eyes. The pale person wants a tan. The tanned person wants lighter skin. The skinny person wants curves. The curvy person wants to be skinny. The person with hair wants different hair. The person losing hair wishes they still had the hair they complain about. At some point, humanity collectively decided that whatever we have isn’t enough.

And if that wasn’t confusing enough, society changes its definition of beauty every ten minutes. One decade, everyone wants to be rail thin. The next decade, everyone wants curves. One year it’s natural beauty. The next year it’s filters, fillers, Botox, injections, lifts, tucks, and enough cosmetic procedures to make a mechanic wonder if we’re discussing people or automobiles. The beauty industry may be the only industry in the world that successfully convinces people they’re broken and then sells them the solution.

What’s fascinating is that while people are desperately trying to become what they think others find attractive, the people they’re trying to attract often find the original version more attractive than the modified one. It’s like spending thousands of dollars trying to become someone else while hoping someone will love you for who you are. But before we get too judgmental, let’s be honest.

Most of us have done the exact same thing.

Maybe not with surgery. Maybe not with injections. Maybe not with filters. But almost everyone has stood in front of a mirror and wished one thing was different. Just one thing. Maybe your nose. Maybe your weight. Maybe your height. Maybe your age. Maybe your hair. Maybe your smile.

What’s funny is that while we’re busy worrying about our nose, someone else wishes they had our nose. While we’re worried about our weight, someone else wishes they had our body. While we’re worried about our age, someone else wishes they had the years ahead of them that we’ve already lived. We spend so much time focusing on what we lack that we rarely appreciate what we’ve been given.

Then there’s the other side of beauty. The side nobody talks about. The side that affects relationships. Beauty has a funny way of making us write stories in our heads. We see an attractive person and immediately begin filling in the blanks. They’re beautiful, so they must be confident. They’re attractive, so they must be kind. They’re successful, so they must be trustworthy. They’re charming, so they must have their life together. We take one visible characteristic and assign twenty invisible ones to it. It’s amazing how often we fall in love with a story we invented ourselves.

Reality, unfortunately, doesn’t always cooperate with the story. Sometimes the most attractive person in the room is carrying wounds nobody can see. Sometimes the most confident-looking person is the most insecure. Sometimes the person everyone wants to be is secretly wishing they were someone else. Maybe the greatest trick beauty ever played wasn’t convincing us someone else was perfect. Maybe it was convincing us we weren’t.

From the beginning, humanity has wrestled with the idea that something about us needs to be changed, improved, hidden, or fixed. Yet the Creator looked at His creation and called it good. Perhaps the problem isn’t that God made a mistake. Perhaps the problem is that we’ve spent our lives comparing His work to everyone else’s. The older I get, the less impressed I am by perfection and the more impressed I am by authenticity.

Beauty can catch your eye. Character captures your respect. Beauty can start a conversation. Character determines whether you stay for the rest of it. Beauty can sell a story. Character reveals the truth. Now before anyone gets upset, none of this means you should stop admiring beauty. It simply means that beauty and character are not the same thing.

One catches the eye. The other captures the heart. Unfortunately, some of us have to learn that lesson by taking a few hooks to the mouth first, which leads us to the tuna.

When Jesus called His disciples to be fishers of men, fishermen cast nets into the water and the fish swam right into them. Fishing today is a little different. The fish know where the nets are. They’re suspicious. They’re cautious. They’ve learned to avoid anything that looks too obvious.

So if you want to catch a tuna, you don’t throw a net. You troll. You put something interesting in front of it. Something shiny. Something that gets its attention. Something that makes it curious enough to follow. Then, eventually, it bites. The fisherman doesn’t catch the tuna because the lure is real. He catches the tuna because the lure looks like something the tuna wants. The tuna sees a shiny object, gets excited, makes a poor life decision, and suddenly finds itself headed somewhere it never intended to go.

Looking back over my life, I’ve discovered I have far more in common with that tuna than I care to admit. And judging by some of the stories I’ve heard from friends over the years, I suspect I’m not swimming alone. And that, my friends, is why this has been…

The Beauty Chronicles.