A Contented Eye

Written By Sheryl Shaffer
 
Most girls love pretty things! There seems to be a natural appreciation for all things pretty for most normal females. There is nothing wrong with appreciating beautiful things. Our Creator God has given us plenty of beautiful things to visually enjoy around us!

I must tell you though…there is one fault that many young girls have that can be extremely harmful when taken to excess. Our eye for pretty things, can become nothing more than vanity when we put too much value on
having pretty things for our own selves.

Today’s advertizing is plentiful, garish and excessive and it feeds in to the human appetite for more and better. Girls, we must be careful to never allow ourselves to go beyond the natural appreciation of enjoying the sight of something pretty into the “gotta have it” stage. The more we see with our eyes, the more dissatisfied we can become with what we already have. HGTV can feed the human eye with “must have” things to
beautify our homes and lives and at the same time turn us into materialistic, unappreciative females.

Lamentations 3:51 “Mine affecteth mine heart because of all the daughters of my city.”

Many a girl has grown up with this kind of eye for pretty things and has ended up as a shopaholic and a credit card junkie. She sees pretty things every where she goes and her dissatisfied heart brings her husband and
herself into financial bondage. She will find that after having pretty things, she still isn’t happy.

This kind of girl just needs to learn to look at the good and beautiful things around her every day and appreciate their simplicity.

I work part time in a pharmacy/gift shop. Often, I see young girls come in with their mothers or fathers and immediately the “begging” starts. Literally, everything they see….they want. I’m always intrigued to see where the parents will draw the line, or if they will at all. I’ve seen girls oooh and ahhhh over one thing after another and because they like everything they are seeing….can’t decide on any one thing. Too often, they already have so much but their eye for pretty things is still gobbling up even more. It’s really not a very pretty sight.

If your desire for pretty things so consumes your heart that you cannot even be thankful for life’s simple things, such as your parents, a warm home, friends, food, a good church, sunshine, flowers, the song of birds outside
your window……you need to realize that the restless spirit that is spoiling your happiness is called discontentment.

Bring your eye for pretty things under control and tell yourself to enjoy simple beauty over man made trinkets and toys. Take the time to look out your window at the beautiful creation of God and ….enjoy it! Take the time to shut off the TV and just listen to the sound of quietness around you. Read a book or sit and reminisce over a photo album of family memories and be thankful for the people in your life that you sometimes take for granted.

Are you a beautiful girl with a contented eye?