Beauty Tips With Granny Branny

James 1:11 "For the sun rises with scorching heat and withers the plant; its blossom falls and its beauty is destroyed..." Alright, so the original context of that quote deals with worldly riches but I believe the same principal applies to the "riches" of physical beauty. Our culture is fixated on the "wild flowers" that look appealing to the eye for a season but whither away and are quickly forgotten.

I recently read some articles on a fascinating missionary woman known as Granny Brand. Having been a missionary for decades and a widow her mission told her to retire at sixty-nine years of age. But she had prayed years before to reach a few more mountain ranges beyond the one she evangelized with the support of her mission and so she climbed those mountains, built a little wooden shack, and worked for twenty-six more years.
With a broken hip and creeping paralysis traveling was cumbersome but not impossible, so she traveled all over the mountains seeking out the unwanted, unlovely, the blind, maimed and discarded, bringing medical treatment to them.
Her son visited her for the last time shortly before her death at ninety-five years of age. Poor nutrition and failing health left her gaunt and fragile. She gave up on keeping up appearances or even looking in a mirror long ago because she did not care to see the effects such a grueling life had taken. Her son noticing only her smile and the character behind it noted, "This is how to grow old. Allow everything else to fall away, until those around you see only love."


Henry Scougal wrote, "The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love." Perhaps a good paraphrase would be, "The beauty of a woman is to be measured by the object of her love."