I'm not a fan of television commercials. Occasionally, though, one comes along that really touches the heart.

Some years ago, David, our lovable five-year-old, brought one to my attention. Bounding into my lap, he rattled off a commercial for the television show "Who's The Boss." When he came to the sentimental punch line, he grabbed my arms, smiled up into my eyes, and uttered the catchwords, "You're beautiful, babe." Pulling him closer, I said, "You're beautiful too, Davy."

For the next few months, when one of us needed encouragement, we repeated those words, "You're beautiful, babe." They convey a powerful idea, the way God feels about everything He has created. God thinks that we are beautiful, special, and wonderful. He ought to know. He's the one who made us.

BEAUTY IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

A good place to take a warm, daily devotional bath is in the soothing revelational waters of Psalm 139. In it David describes God's view of His creation of every living person:

"You made my whole being; you formed me in my mother's body. I praise you because you made me in an amazing and wonderful way. What you have done is wonderful. I know this very well. You saw my bones being formed as I took shape in my mother's body. When I was put together there, you saw my body as it was formed. All the days planned for me were written in your book before I was one day old. God, your thoughts are precious to me. They are so many! If I could count them, they would be more than all the grains of sand. When I wake up, I am still with you" (Psalm 139:13-18, emphasis mine).

This passage describes God's view of the earthly beginnings of each one of us. Peering into his mother's womb through the eyes of God, David was struck by wonder that:

- God was the one Who carefully formed each of us (v.13).
- He did it in an utterly amazing way (v.14).
- He watched over every detail of the process (vv.15,16).
- Every day of our lives was planned (v.16).
- God's loving thoughts toward us are greater than all the grains of sand in the world (v.18).

What an incredible revelation about our beginnings! What sometimes seemed like just a wearying nine-month marathon for mom was actually the making of a masterpiece by God. David said that he understood this truth very well. No wonder he was a man with a sense of destiny.

A MIXED-UP VIEW OF BEAUTY

The world has a strange concept of beauty. From Barbie to Miss America, the message seems to be that beauty lies in conformity. That's why in the 1960s all the girls wanted straight hair and thin bodies. (Remember Twiggy?) In the next decade, curly came "in" (inspired by Farrah Fawcett who recently died of cancer) and everyone bought a curling iron. Men wore long hair in the 60s and 70s. Then they returned to short hair (moussed, of course) for two decades, followed by colored and spiked.

But it all boiled down to one thing: to be beautiful, you had to look a certain way. It helped if you were born a bit good-looking, but no matter. One could always fall back on estrogen, collagen, or plastic surgery. Unfortunately, that left the average person with a number of problems:

- The majority of us were not born with all the natural attributes our culture deems beautiful.
- Even if we looked "better than most," the standard of beauty kept changing.
- Most of us couldn't afford the clothes, let alone the treatments, to stay in the race.

So most of us just concluded that we weren't beautiful. And the older we got, the more we decided it wasn't even worth the effort. We'd settle for a normal, ugly life.

BEAUTIFULLY YOU

But God has a different concept of beauty. What makes you beautiful to Him is your uniqueness. He deliberately made only one of you. He gave you the skin color He wanted you to have; He designed you with the build of His choice; He gave you a temperament, personality, and physical makeup unlike anyone else.He gave you a special smile, a unique frown, and a laugh tailored to your personality. He chose the color of your eyes and hair. He even numbered the hairs on your head.

He did this with everything He created. No two snowflakes are alike, no two rocks, no stars in the sky, no blades of grass. In all the universe, God's concept of beauty is based upon individuality. Our differences in race, temperament, and gifts are our glory, not a point of competition.  He doesn't want a world of Barbie dolls.  He wants you and he wants me. He made each one of us

BEAUTIFUL IN OUR UNIQUENESS.

Along with that comes an individually-crafted destiny. No wonder David could exclaim:"The Lord is all I need. He takes care of me. My share in life has been pleasant; My part has been beautiful. I praise the Lord because he advises me. So I rejoice and am glad" (Psalm 16:5,6,7,9 emphasis mine).

YOU MUST HAVE BEEN A BEAUTIFUL BABY

God chose a time and place to bring you into his plans for planet earth. He wanted to add someone unique and wonderful to the race of man. His idea was YOU. For a moment, take yourself back to those precious beginning days in your mother's womb. Let's imagine what God was up to when he decided it was time to create YOU...

You began when the sperm cell from your father united with the egg cell of your mother. These two particular cells were chosen by God out of millions that participated in the process. God breathed into these chosen cells the gift of life. At this moment of conception, you were smaller than a grain of sand. From two tiny cells, you would explode over some 266 days into a newborn baby weighing approximately seven-and-a-half pounds and containing sixty trillion cells--about the same number of stars that exist in our galaxy!

God linked together 23 chromosomes from the mother with 23 chromosomes from the father, each set carrying fifteen thousand genes from each parent cell. The color of your eyes, hair, and skin; facial features; body type; and certain qualities of personality and intelligence were all determined by His skillful genetic choices.

While causing the cells of your new being to multiply, He gently led you down your mother's fallopian tube to His workshop in the womb. There He gently implanted you in the soft wall of a uterus which had been specially prepared by a hormone called progesterone. Over the coming weeks, God would allow you to "signal" your mother that you were there by causing her to miss a menstrual period.

He then continued His skillful work by creating a bubbly sac in which to protect and insulate you, and creating an engineering marvel in the umbilical cord to feed you food and oxygen. Each day He rapturously created more of you at a dizzying rate of speed. He laughed at three weeks as your tiny heart took its first beat. On your 24th day, you had no arms or legs. Before a month had gone by, He carefully crafted your limbs, backbone, spinal column, and nervous system. By the end of four weeks He had molded you into a marvelous being that was ten thousand times your original size.

During your second and third months of life, the Master Craftsman went to work on your incredibly unique features. He delicately formed your nose, lips, and tongue. He moved muscle cells into position and soon 40 muscle sets began their first exercises. He lengthened your arms to be as long as printed exclamation marks, and carefully formed your fingers and toes, complete with fingerprints that would give you an individual identity for the rest of your life.

As your eyelids closed, as thin as butterfly wings, and as God covered you with a translucent-looking skin, you assumed an ethereal, transcendent beauty. You slept. You awoke. From six weeks on, God gave you the ability to experience the sensation of pain. He shed his first tears over you as He thought about the pains of life you would encounter on the way to your heavenly home.

For the next few months, the Lord God developed and refined your unique characteristics at an astonishing rate of speed. Your umbilical cord was then transporting three hundred quarts of fluid a day at speeds up to four miles an hour. It was as if the Master could not wait for you to burst upon His world. You heard you mother's voice for the first time. You sucked your thumb. Meanwhile, the Lord sent your oil and sweat glands into motion and began to cover you with a white greasy-looking ointment called vernix to protect your skin from the amniotic waters. Your eyes opened. God smiled as the first rays of dim light entered your being.

During the final three months, your loving Creator fastidiously prepared you for entrance into this world. Finishing touches were added to your rapidly growing features. He thickened and polished your skin, preparing it for the 30- to 40-degree drop in temperature that you would encounter at birth. He carefully stored a layer of fat beneath your skin both for insulation and as a food supply. Approximately one week before the two hundred and sixtieth day, He lovingly turned your head downward into the pelvic cavity.

His masterpiece was now ready. Beginning your mother's labor pains (a reminder of the consequence of Eve's original sin), He put away His tools, looked lovingly and hopefully at your waiting face, and gave the signal.Angels gathered at your side. Humans scurried about, readying a room for the experience called delivery. You were now ready for the miracle of birth. God smiled with the breadth of eternal understanding. What He had made was good.

BELIEVE IT

God wants each of us to recognize the wonder of our creation and to believe that we've been created by amazing design and loving foresight. When he gave you the spark of life, and exploded you into existence from two cells to over sixty trillion cells,

--he smiled . . . worked. . . mused . . . and rejoiced that you were different from any other being he'd  ever created. And surely He must have whispered to himself,

"You're beautiful, babe."