CVS will end airbrushing in -s for its store-brand beauty products by 2020. Why? “The connection between the propagation of unrealistic body images and negative health effects, especially in girls and young women, has been established,” explained the company’s president.
What should our culture learn from this step toward transparent truthfulness?
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat describes “the most American approach to matters of faith: a religious individualism that blurs the line between the God out there and the God Within, a gnostic spirituality that constantly promises access to a secret and personalized wisdom, a gospel of health and wealth that insists that the true spiritual adept will find both happiness and money.”
As a result, according to the Colson Center’s John Stonestreet, “America’s greatest affliction is a poverty of meaning, of purpose, of something to fill that great spiritual emptiness we feel at the heart of our nation.”
We can confuse “your truth” with “the truth,” pretending that we are more and better than we are and projecting to the world an idealized self that we know is false. But there’s a better way.
“I have no good apart from you”
Consider a simple prayer I encountered this week. In Psalm 16, David said to God, “You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you” (v. 2).
This is one of the most profound statements of self-awareness in all of literature.
“Good” translates the Hebrew tobah, meaning “practical benefit, desirability, morality.” In the eyes of the world, David had great “good” apart from God. In practical terms, he had wonderful gifts in leadership, athletic ability, and music. In terms of desirability, he was extremely handsome (1 Samuel 16:12). In moral terms, he was described by God as “a man after my own heart” (Acts 13:22 NIV; 1 Samuel 13:14).
And yet he said to God, “I have no good apart from you.” David was clearly aware of the…
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