You asked where contentment fits in with the issue of appearance. Contentment is a result of receiving with joy God’s gifts, assignments, and calling. It is a freedom to be others-oriented instead of beholden to what the Bible calls “fear of man” – the constant concern about what others think of us. If we sow to fear of man, the harvest we will reap is found in that passage above. It’s a short walk from craving men’s approval for our looks to indulging sensuality, impurity, and sexual immorality. On the flip side, fearing what others think of us quickly leads to enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, and envy.

We don’t have to live such sinful, contentious lives. Christ came to redeem us from this vicious cycle of sin and to give us the fruit of righteousness. Through the Holy Spirit, we do receive the fruit of self-control. So there is hope for living an orderly, disciplined life. But it is not a life lived for our own glory. It is a life lived for His glory. Any glory that we think we have is fleeting – most especially in our appearance.

But don’t misunderstand me.

It’s not wrong for a woman to adorn herself or seek to make herself attractive. What the Bible warns against is the excess that results in immodest or ostentatious displays, or an effort that becomes a life-consuming pursuit. The Hebrew word that is translated as vain in the phrase “charm is deceitful and beauty is vain” (Proverbs 31:30) is hebel, which means “emptiness or vanity, something transitory and unsatisfactory.” This is the same word that permeates the book of Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes is an exploration of the meaning of life, but by the second chapter, the writer has concluded that pleasure, laughter, hard work, homes, gardens, herds, servants, gold and silver, and even wisdom are hebel! This overstatement is effective, because the writer goes on to call hebel “striving after the wind.” Many good things are called hebel because we can’t grasp true satisfaction from these items any more than we can grasp the wind. There’s nothing wrong with these activities, but they won’t provide the fulfillment we often seek to derive from them. In the same way, beauty is hebel. There’s nothing inherently wrong with beauty, but the meaning and fulfillment we seek in it will elude us like the wind through our fingers – just as you are discovering.

In all seriousness, I believe that it’s God’s mercy that we fall apart as we get older. How humbling it is to end one’s creaturely life dependent on others, unable to function as we once did, no longer as attractive as we were at our prime. It drives home the point that there is only One whose glory is unalterable. If that lesson didn’t sink in as young adults, it will certainly sink in later. We might rail against it, we might work hard to hide the effects, but we won’t change the immutable fact that “all flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever” (1 Peter 1:24-25).