Ugly. Today I sat with three little girls who must have said that word at least twenty times. I never realized how much I despise the mere existence of that word until today. Four letters that have taken a painful blow on the self esteems of countless little girls. As I sat on the play ground with three beautiful young Swazi girls, my heart broke every time that word slipped out of their little mouths. They ranged from the ages of ten to fourteen and had come to the care point for a meal of beans and porridge after a long day at school. As they twisted our hair in their little fingers and stroked our arms and stared in awe at our lighter complexions, I could barely get my words out. One by one each of the little girls took turns explaining to us why they thought they were ugly. “All Swazis are ugly, don’t you know?”As I stared into their big brown eyes all I wanted to do was scream “No, I don’t know.” We opened the Bible and showed them that they were each fearfully and wonderfully made by God and forced each of them to say “I am beautiful”. But looking into their eyes I could just tell they didn’t believe it. On the walk home up the rocky hill, I just couldn’t get my mind to stop thinking about these precious girls. Someone at some point in their lives must have introduced that word to them and it frustrated me to think of how much damage it had already done. James 3:9 says that “with the tongue we praise our Lord and father, and with it we also curse human beings who have been made in God’s likeness”. The fact that a word like ugly could even exist to describe us who are made in the likeness of God blows my minds. It is the ugliest word I know because when we take a moment and realize that the same hands that created each twinkling star and every grand mountain also created us, ugly is the last word that should come to our minds. My heart breaks for my little Swazi sisters. I pray that each of them would come to know how far from “ugly” they truly are.
