Be You To The Full

BEAUTIFUL = “Be YOU t(o) (the) FULL”

My Aunt Belle, a kind and wonderful woman, frequently pronounced some words with great exaggeration for humorous effect. 

It occurred to me recently that her pronunciation of one word in that fashion contained significant additional meaning. It is the word “beautiful”. She would enunciate it thus for special effect: BE-YOU-T-FULL. She would say, “You are BE-YOU-T-FULL!”, or  “It is BE-YOU-T-FULL!”, or  “That was BE-YOU-T-FULL!”

Pondering memory of her exaggeration of the word, I noticed a series of further extended transformations of significance:

Beautiful —> be you t’ full —> be you to full —> be you to (the) full = be fully you

(To be) beautiful = (To) be fully yourself

Don’t cheat your Maker, or the world, of beauty by being less than you were made to be; less than you can be; less than is in you from Him to fully manifest by being yourself. 

Some call it “being authentic”. You are truly beautiful when you are the authentic you, the real you, the you as you are, and not some masked, disguised, made up, inauthentic presentation of you.

I don’t know why, but as I was thinking and writing about this (my Aunt and her funny pronunciations, and lessons masked in a lightly appreciated word), I was inspired to share (as a summation) this quote from Scripture: John 11:43 “…He cried with a loud voice, LAZARUS, COME FORTH.” 

Emergent beauty in the fullness of its expression (yours, mine, that latent all around) has much in common with an amazing historical event. 

And here's some more to think about regarding allowing the beauty in you to manifest fully:

John 14:18,20,23 "I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you...At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you...If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.

John 17:21-23 "That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. [22] And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: [23] I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me."

Ephesians 5:30-32 "For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. [31] For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. [32] This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church."

Since the Lord is literally in us and we are literally in Him, to be fully ourselves is a dignity of immeasurable value; and our obligation to be beautiful (to be ourselves fully) is of utmost significance.

And one further consideration: the poet John Keats in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn”proclaimed “Beauty is truth, truth beauty…” The Lord Jesus Christ proclaimed, “I am…the truth”. Therefore, having Him in us, or — equivalently —having His word in us (since His word is truth) means that being fully ourselves is necessarily a manifestation of beauty.

The Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior, is altogether beautiful.