Last week, I got an idea for an entry on beauty and began scribbling down sentences, citing respectable authors, saving my work, and repeating the process many times over.  Then I realized that what I was really trying to say in those 350 words, John and Stasi Eldridge had already said in 60 in their book Captivating, and it was this:

Perhaps the only things standing in the way of my beauty are my doubts and fears and the hiding and striving I fall to as a result…so the choice a woman makes is not to conjure up beauty, but to let her defenses down.  To choose to se aside her normal means of survival and just let her heart show up (133).

Lord, I believe, but please help me with my unbelief.