Mascara= the dead giveaway.

"Are you planning on crying today?" I asked.

"Um... not really?" she replied.

"So regular mascara is OK?" I grinned.

The above is my signature joke when I apply makeup.  It isn't very funny, but it always eases a girl's nerves as my quivering hands angle a long, pointed wand toward her cornea.

I love mascara, and I would say that it is without a doubt my favorite item in my makeup bag.  Although there are so many colors and varieties, I stick with the blackest black voluminizing types.  The ultimate in accomplishing big, beautiful lashes without flaking or clumping that I have found is Lancome Hypnose Drama.  It runs about $25 per tube, which although is sort of pricey for the average girl, does exactly what it claims to do.  Curl your lashes and apply Lancome Cils Booster XL beforehand, and they will be the envy of all of your girlfriends, guaranteed.

I love mascara.

But lets say a girl walks out of the house with 2 pounds of black shellac on her eyes, and something happens.  Although this world can be beautiful, sometimes tears unexpectantly find us, especially when we are Kleenex-less, hankie-less, and of course now covered in water-soluble black sludge.  And looking in the mirror afterward, one might say "I hate mascara."

Mascara= the dead giveaway.

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you have figured out that I am a lover of my Bible, and a lover of the God it so beautifully portrays.  1 John 4:10 says that love is not that I love God, but that He first loved me; and the Bible is full of gorgeous examples of this love.  Strength, encouragement, power, endurance, and always comfort- the Bible paints the most beautiful landscape of our love story.  And in despair, when a flood of tears have completely wrecked my flawless made-up face, I think of Psalm 56:8, when the writer paints a picture of God catching our tears in a bottle.  Or perhaps I think of Psalm 139:13-14, when the writer reveals that our God thinks of us on more occasions than there are grains of sand.

How beautiful.  What a God I serve!

It is all so infinitely hard to understand- that there are so many humans on the earth- and God can keep up with us all so intimately.  But if God was a being I could wrap my mind around- if He was in anyway quantifiable, would I count Him as God?  My father said yesterday, "Well, you know what they say?  In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and in the end man returned the favor."

We have all tried to create a picture of God in our brains.  He is male, he is female, he cares about our favorite sports teams, he doesn't care at all, he wants us to do good, he wants us to have money, he wants us to be poor, he accepts us just the way we are, he doesn't accept us at all- we have all given him traits to help our finite brains understand who He could be.  I study the Bible, which portrays him as infinite.  He is infinitely powerful, and also infinitely able to care about me enough to number my hairs (Luke 12:7).

And I am his poem (Ephesians 2:10).

And he is the lifter of my head (Ps. 3:3)

And he catches those tears that have wrecked my makeup.

And I love him.  But only because he loved me first.

Rachel Bee