Peace with enemies

Proverbs 16:7 (NLT)

7 When people’s lives please the Lord, even their enemies are at peace with them.

If we make it our care to be reconciled to God, and to keep ourselves in his love, he will incline those that have been envious towards us, and vexatious to us, to entertain a good opinion of us and to become our friends. ~ Matthew Henry

The Kenyan actress, Lupita Nyong'o, who received the 2014 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in 12 Years as a Slave, offered this moving reflection on the nature of true beauty:

I remember a time when I too felt unbeautiful. I put on the TV and only saw pale skin. I got teased and taunted about my night-shaded skin. And my one prayer to God, the miracle worker, was that I would wake up lighter-skinned … [But] every day I experienced the same disappointment of being just as dark as I had been the day before. I tried to negotiate with God: I told him I would stop stealing sugar cubes at night if he gave me what I wanted; I would listen to my mother's every word and never lose my school sweater again if he just made me a little lighter. But I guess God was unimpressed with my bargaining chips because He never listened.

And when I was a teenager my self-hate grew worse … My mother reminded me often that she thought that I was beautiful but that was no consolation: She's my mother, of course she's supposed to think I am beautiful … And my mother again would say to me, "You can't eat beauty. It doesn't feed you." And these words plagued and bothered me … until finally I realized that beauty was not a thing that I could acquire or consume, it was something that I just had to be … And what my mother meant when she said you can't eat beauty was that you can't rely on how you look to sustain you. [Essence, "Lupita Nyongo Delivers Moving 'Black Women in Hollywood" Acceptance Speech" (2-28-14)]

There are many enemies against us in this world. Sometimes one of those enemies can be ourselves not listening to what God is saying to us. For God tells us that we are precious in His sight. We just need to stop and believe what He is telling us.