Joy in the Genuine

   I asked our 24 year-old son if he thought a girl without make-up could be beautiful and he said, "No!" This made me sad to think that he did not understand the principle of quality and had chosen to dwell in the superficial.
    This is the same boy, who when he was about 2, was confronted by a clown in a park with bold face make up displaying a big red smile, a ball for a nose and big painted on happy eyes.  When he saw the clown, he cried and screamed and hid him face in my clothes. He was terrified and from then on hated and feared clowns.
     His dad wanted to rent a Barney (the green dinosaur) costume for a children's event to delight his son, since Barney was his favorite TV show at the time.  When his father put the dinosaur head piece on in the costume shop, our son, again, cried and screamed.  The trial run save us quite a bit of money and put an end to that brilliant idea.
     He never liked stuffed animal heads either.  They scared him.  He never wanted to go into a room where a taxidermist had created something, though he dearly loved animals.
     His strong natural sense of preferring the real, the living, the genuine and disdaining the fake was alive and well. I understood where he was coming from.
     The images of the world's media definitely go for perfection and the superficial.  How could you really think that a made-up image was more beautiful than the real thing?  I appreciated his honesty, but I do hope that will gain a different perspective as he matures.
      When he meets the girl of his dreams, I hope that she will be so beautiful to him on the inside that the outside  will be almost insignificant.  I hope that he will learn that superficiality may make a promise that it cannot deliver and that the superficial appears to be something that it is really not.
      Okay,  I am not a guy, but this blog is about joy.  I hope my son will learn to find joy in sincerity and truth.  I hope he will grow to find joy in the genuine, "real deal".