Chris' prayer: Kutless' "Not What You See"

Do you feel the tensions rise?
Do you know why we always fight to be better?
Better than you and you better than me?

The other night, I watched a show on television that I had never seen before. After flipping through the few channels I get and not seeing anything I recognized, I settled on True Beauty, a reality show where the contestants compete to see who is truly the most beautiful person, inside and out. The show puts the contestants through obvious physical beauty tests, but also secretly evaluates how beautiful each contestant is on the inside. At the end of the night, as with many reality shows, one person is voted off, in this case by three judges.

Throughout the show, many of the contestants were insulting the others, comparing their physical features to those of their competitors, and trying to assert how favorably they compared. The eventual losing contestant said, "I'm the most gorgeous, dammit. I don't care what...Mr. Palmer [the doctor who gave all the contestants their first test] said."

As I watched the show, knowing what was going on, I wondered how I would do in a competition like this. As a Christian, would I be gracious and loving as I'm called to be, or would I get caught up in the competition as the cameras are hoping, and wind up betraying who I am called to be, if not verbally, then by my actions. When all the cameras are on me, and even when I think that they have all moved on, would I make the gracious, loving choices?

I realize that True Beauty appeals to the lowest common denominator and that there are much better things that I could be doing with my time. But, ultimately, I hope this show will reward exactly the person who Jon Micah Sumrall is talking about in this song: the one who is not what others see, but the one who serves others.


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