What Makes You Beautiful?

Dannah Gresh: As her daughters grow, Kristen Wetherell wants them to become beautiful in all the ways that matter—so she wrote them a poem.

Kristen Wetherell: 

What makes you beautiful, my dear,
Is not your eyes, your ears, your nose,
The face that your reflection shows.
It's not about the things you do,
The gifts and work God's given you.

Dannah: That poem became the devotional for girls, titled “What Makes You Beautiful?”

Kristen: It's not what people say or do, but what God says is true of you. For God says beauty is the art of loving Him with all your heart.

Dannah: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Lies Women Believe: And the Truth That Sets Them Free, for Monday, August 10, 2026. I’m Dannah Gresh.

I’ve got Kristen Wetherell with me today. She is a wife, a mom, and the author of numerous books, including Help for the Hungry Soul, Humble Moms, and the award-winning Hope When It Hurts.

Kristen, welcome back to Revive Our Hearts. You have really become a Revive Our Hearts favorite.

Kristen: Well, you're my favorite, so I'm just so thankful to be here. Thank you for having me.

Dannah: I have a really humdinger of a question. I've never said humdinger, actually, on the Revive Our Hearts’ air before, but I just did. The last time we got together to interview, you were having what I'd call one of those sanctifying mom days. I don't know if you remember. So how is it going today? How is today?

Kristen: (Laughing) Oh it’s so funny that you said that, because I prayed on the way here. I said, “Lord, I know that tears can be good. Tears are healing. Sometimes people just need to hear the person speaking cry because they need to know that they’re human, too. But, please, I would just like to not cry today, please.”

You know, motherhood is, as we raise these precious little souls, I’m just constantly humbled. I’m constantly humbled by my need for God to basically do the same work in my heart that I’m wanting Him to do in their hearts.

Dannah: Yes.

Kristen: So I’m sitting before you needing God’s grace, tired because my son woke up at 4:50 a.m. because his hand hurt. And so, it’s, as you know, one day at a time by God’s grace.

Dannah: Why did his hand hurt?

Kristen: I don’t know. We never figured it out, but, alas . . .

Dannah: We were up Friday night late. I feel for you. My dog, for whatever reason, barked at 5:40 this morning, and I never went back to sleep after that.

Okay, you have felt led by the Lord to really focus on the topic of true beauty for your two beautiful girls. Tell us about your girls first.

Kristen: Yes, I would love to. My eldest is Joanna, and she will be true girl age very soon. She will be eight in October.

Dannah: Yay! I will send her a welcome box. She’s going to get that very soon.

Kristen: And my youngest is Lydia; she is two and a half. So they are dear sisters, and then I have my little five-year-old son, John, in the middle of them.

But I think about them, pray for them all the time because I am a female, and I know the struggles that females go through.

Dannah: So you must already be beginning to see the battle for beauty in their hearts.

Kristen: Yes.

Dannah: How are you seeing that? 

Kristen: Well, I think it starts early. Some of it is good because God made us for Himself. God made us to be drawn to glorious, beautiful things because He’s glorious and beautiful.

From the very beginning, I have seen Joanna being drawn to Disney princesses, and that’s not a bad thing. But I wrote her a poem that I hoped might become like a picture book or something to direct her heart to the source of true beauty because when we look at a lot of these messages that we’re seeing in these movies, it really is about appearance. It really is about even how you behave. And that’s not where beauty is found. 

The world will throw lies at us all the time, but I see in them frequently a desire to be told, “You’re really beautiful,” and to adorn themselves. And what a neat way to get them to point to the One who can adorn them.

Dannah: That’s right. I think we have this desire in us with our girls to tell them they’re beautiful. I didn’t ever feel like telling my son that, but I felt like telling my girl that. The world has had a sort of backlash against that by saying, “You should never tell them they’re beautiful. You should tell them they’re strong. You should tell them they’re independent. You should tell them they’re capable. You should tell them they’re smart.”

I’m not sure that the answer for our overfocus and obsession with external physical beauty is never to affirm it. What is it that you want your daughters to know about their beauty?

Kristen: Well, a number of things, but ultimately, I want them to know that they’re beautiful because they’re made in the image of God. They’re beautiful because God is their Maker and their Creator, and He has imprinted His own image upon them.

And isn’t that what I still need to hear every single day because even I am looking left and right to try and figure out what gives me value and what brings me worth. And at the end of the day, it’s not how many books I’ve written. It’s not how well my kids are doing. It’s not the way that I look. It’s the fact that I’m made in the image of God. I really do have eternity stamped upon my heart because He’s done that.

Dannah: Okay. You say that like it’s easy to figure out. I’m looking at you. You are really . . . God did well when He made you. You are a beautiful, beautiful woman. You are a gorgeous woman.

Kristen: You’re kind.

Dannah: So, I mean, have you had beauty struggles? Did you struggle to figure that out? Did you struggle to get to the point where you believed what has value in terms of beauty? It’s not what I look at in the mirror, but it’s the stamp of God’s image on my spirit.

Kristen: Yes, I have. And I would say, where does it come from? I don’t know. Is it just a sense in our fallen spirit, the spirit that’s been affected by sin where we are looking elsewhere for worth and dignity? I would say it happens especially in the formative years of high school and college, where you become attuned to what’s around you.

When you’re really little, you just don’t care, and that’s just so wonderful. I love that about little kids. They are not worried about what other people think. I think that’s why Jesus says we’re to come to Him like little children. There’s just no pretense. What you see is what you get, and they just don’t really care.

And then suddenly, as we develop and mature, we’re suddenly aware. “Oh, people have thoughts. Maybe they’re about me?”

So I would say, especially in the college years when I was trying to figure out what it meant to just live on my own as an independent person . . . I’ve always been very driven, and body-image issues, I would say, kind of took root in that time.

And I wouldn't say in the least that I struggled with an eating disorder or anything like that, but I would say that I struggled with some disordered thinking about taking care of myself, about my body, about exercise, about eating.

And honestly, Dannah, it wasn’t until the Lord took the legs out from under me. I found out that I had Lyme’s Disease, and all of that was just completely taken from me. He began to do a great healing work.

Dannah: How old were you when that happened?

Kristen: It wasn’t until a number of years later. I wasn’t diagnosed with Lyme until 2014, so I would have been twenty-five years old.

Dannah: So you were a young adult.

Kristen: Yes.

Dannah: So you suffered through those teen years and those college years, and like most of us, trying to figure it out. How did being diagnosed with a disease, how did that sort through all those beauty lies for you?

Kristen: That’s a great question. I couldn’t exercise anymore; I was so weak. Some of my symptoms involved joint pain, muscular weakness, chronic fatigue. My immune system was completely shot. So all the things that I prided myself on before. “Oh, I’m training for a triathlon, and I have all these goals” . . .

I’ve always been very Type-A, so if I have a goal, I go and I get it. I thought about some of these things. I had a goal, and so I had to work out so many times a week in order to achieve the goal. I need to eat a certain way so that my muscles are healthy.

And then suddenly you feel terrible, and you can’t do any of the things that you wanted to do. It’s incredibly reorienting and incredibly humbling. Like, I am more than my body, but also, God is going to redeem my body some day. Some day I’m going to have a body that doesn’t break down. It was just very reorienting, very perspective shifting for me.

Dannah: Yes. So my husband Bob and I have just walked through this because he’s had long Covid. He had the same kind of things—muscle pain, joint pain, fatigue. Everything gets stripped away, and you have to stand before the Lord and ask what your value really lies in.

I’m thinking when you were sharing your testimony of 1 Timothy 4:8, which says, “Bodily training does have some value [right?] but godliness has a much higher value.” Our spiritual training has a much higher value. And it sounds to me like when you’re talking about your standard of beauty and physical wellness, you are emphasizing the bodily training.

Kristen: Absolutely.

Dannah: But the Lord brought you to a place of reckoning.

Kristen: That’s right. And it makes me think too of Isaiah 40:7–8, “The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the Lord blows on it. Surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of the Lord endures forever.” Right? Godliness has value in every way. That will last.

And Christians are not gnostics. We don’t disparage the body.

Dannah: Right.

Kristen: We’re not saying our bodies are bad. God created us with bodies, and Jesus was raised from the dead in a body. And someday God will raise our bodies to be like His glorious body. So, God cares about our bodies, but these earthly bodies are not forever.

Dannah: Right.

Kristen: I think when we have a very physical, real understanding of that, it gives us perspective about what does endure forever.

Dannah: So, I think you have figured out some really important things. It sounds like you figured them out in your twenties. That’s about when I figured out some of these lies myself, in my twenties. But you kind of would like your daughters not to have to learn on the hot pavement of life what it took you so long to learn. Is that what's burning in your heart? Am I sensing that?

Kristen: Oh, absolutely. I think God is helping me come to peace with the reality, though, that some of these lessons will just have to be learned. I can’t protect them from everything, and I can’t control everything, but I can teach them.

I can say, “Here is part of my story.” I feel so privileged that I get to write these resources that I can hand them and say, “I wrote this for you.” This is something I wish that I’d had, something that I wish that I’d thought more about in those years.

And I hope, by God’s grace, that I model it. I know that I’m not a perfect person—none of us are—but by God’s grace, I hope that I model it. And yet, I know I can’t control or protect them from the work that God is going to do. And despite me or through me, or whatever it is, God is going to do His work in their life.

Dannah: That’s right.

Kristen: That does bring me a lot of peace.

Dannah: It does. It brings me peace, too.

Okay, so, you sat down one day . . . I don’t know, was it one day? How long did it take you? You wrote a poem about beauty for your daughters. Tell us the story of what led up to writing that poem.

Kristen: Well, I was thinking about my daughter, Joanna, who was five at the time (Lydia was not with us yet), and her obsession with Disney princesses. We really did try to screen some of those movies, but some of them were really great, sweet movies. So we would watch parts of them with her and read books. She was just so drawn to beautiful things, and princessy things.

And so I just decided I would write her a picture book, giving her a better vision for beauty. So that’s what the poem is. It was actually a picture book that was intended for my Joanna.

And when I submitted it to the publisher, they said, “We’re wondering if developmentally this is maybe a little above that age group. And so perhaps it’s a resource for pre-teens. Maybe we expand it and turn it into a devotional and a poem is a part of it.”

So that’s how What Makes You Beautiful? came to be. I’ve been pretty humbled because my daughter was excited about it for about two days. We did two days of devotions together, and then she said, “Eh, we can do this another time.”

Dannah: Yes. When she’s ten or twelve or thirteen, she’ll be ready for it.

So you’ve written this poem. It’s radically vulnerable. It’s beautiful. They’re the words of discipleship from a mother’s heart to a daughter’s heart in an area where the battle will be thick, the battle over what she thinks and believes when she looks in the mirror and sees herself.

What part of this poem is maybe the most poignant, most precious, most meaningful to you that you really want your girls to grasp onto? Would you read that for us?

Kristen: I would love to. It’s a little section toward the end. It says: 

What makes you beautiful, my dear,
Is not your eyes, your ears, your nose,
The face that your reflection shows.
It's not about the things you do,
The gifts and work God's given you.
The risks you take, the friends you make, 
Or beauty, for pure beauty’s sake. 

It’s not what people say or do,
But what God says is true of you.
For God says beauty is the art of loving Him
With all your heart.

Dannah: Oh, that is beautiful. Of course, there’s a few pages of the poem before that, and about a page after that, but the book is divided up to where we hear a little bit of the poem on each day’s devo.

So, let’s go into that day’s devo, or some of the content from what you just read. Where do you go in God’s Word to really help her learn that beauty is the art of loving Him with all of your heart?

Kristen: Well, in that day’s devotional, the Scripture that we look at is Deuteronomy 6, which is the greatest commandment: 

“You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. [And God says] These words that I command you today shall be on your heart.” (vv. 5–6)

So what is the great aim of our life? Where is the highest joy to be found? It’s in loving the Lord because that’s what we were made for. And yet, our hearts are just so drawn to so many other loves.

It’s not that we can’t love other things, and I hope that I teach on that faithfully in this book. God created us also to enjoy His good gifts. And He created us to be pointed to Him in so many of the things that we enjoy. And yet, they’re not ultimate things. They’re meant to point us to the gift, which is Him.

So, yes, growing and loving the Lord, isn’t that our great privilege and great challenge in the Christian life?

Dannah: Yes. I’m sitting here thinking as you say, “What makes you beautiful, my dear, it’s not your eyes, your ears, your nose, the face that your reflection shows,” and yet, everything is a picture of a spiritual truth. Right? Every physical reality is directing us to Him.

Romans 1:20, “Creation screams out to us about His power and His character” (paraphrase)

And you even mentioned that whole princess idea. Isn’t that us trying to tell the story of God’s rescue of our heart?

Kristen: Yes. The kids and I talk about that all the time. Yes.

Dannah: What do you tell them?

Kristen: Well, sometimes my daughter will roll her eyes at me because she knows I’m going to do this, almost every time. But just try and figure out how God’s story is in every other story because His story is the source. That’s where we got all of our best ideas from—from Him.

So we’ll look at a movie like Beauty and the Beast. That’s my favorite Disney movie. That was my favorite Disney princess. I think we see there a picture of how a faithful love actually changes a heart. So I think Belle, in a sense, is almost a picture of Christ—how He comes to love the unloveable, and in loving them, He changes them.

We even see this glorious picture of the resurrection at the end where this beast dies, but then he’s raised. He’s raised into his actual self. And that’s what’s going to happen to us.

Dannah: Yes.

Kristen: So I write up every time I talk about it, and my daughter looks at me, and she says, “There’s mom again.”

Dannah: I love it! I love it so much! There’s a Christy Nockel’s song. Have you listened to the Christy Nockel’s Lullabies for the Beloved album?

Kristen: I have not, but I’ve heard of it.

Dannah: Oh, she’s amazing. In one of those songs the lyrics say, “Every fairytale you’ve heard, they have borrowed your story.” And it’s just the concept that every fairytale that you’re going to read is really our hearts just reaching out for the rescue story of Jesus Christ. So you let them roll their eyes when you tell them that every time. They’re going to be telling the kids behind them. It’s so fun.

I remember sitting at a firepit and overhearing one of my daughters, who was in college at the time, telling a high school girl in our Christian high school words that I had told her over and over again as advice. And she’s telling this girl, and I’m, like, “Wait a minute! Didn’t you roll your eyeballs into the back of your head every time I told you that between the ages of five and fifteen?” They’re parroting it. She will one day tell her story to her daughter because you have so faithfully told yours.

I love the book. It’s beautiful, of course. Anybody that knows me knows that I have a special call on my life for God’s little women. Revive Our Hearts is all about helping women grow in freedom, fullness and fruitfulness in Christ. But my heart beats for the little women—the pre-teens and even younger than that.

So you’ve written this beautiful, beautiful twenty daily devotions for girls, What Makes You Beautiful? What age group do you think it’s most appropriate for?

Kristen: Really the pre-teen years, so eight–twelve, somewhere in there, even nine–twelve, because I do think some of the context are a bit abstract. So they want to be developmentally ready for it. But I also try to keep it simple.

Dannah: Well, here’s the thing about it. You’ve written with poetry in the beginning, and then you’ve unpacked that poetry in each of the daily devos. Two things I really commend you for:

One is poetry forces us to be intimate with the words, and that forces us to learn. So that’s a beautiful learning tool. And the other thing I would say is your eight, your nine, maybe your ten-year-olds, they’re going to need mom-daughter devo time with this book. And that’s a really good thing because you’re teaching them how to have devos. You’re teaching them how to digest something.

But then, the ten, eleven, twelve-year-olds are going to probably want this tool and learn some independence in their devotional time.

So, I love it. I highly recommend it. Kristen, I read dozens and dozens of books for this age group every single year, and this is at the top of the list. It’s a beautiful book, well written, and I’m so happy for us to share it with our Revive Hearts’ audience.

Kristen: Oh, well, thank you. Praise God.

Dannah: Well, praise God indeed.

The book, What Makes You Beautiful? is available on our website at ReviveOurHearts.com/store. And exciting news: today we’re offering this resource for a donation of any amount. To give and request a copy for you or a pre-teen you love, visit ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959. We’re so excited for you to dive into the topic of beauty with the little women in your life.

Now, speaking of little women, many of you know that they have a big piece of my heart. I founded a ministry called, True Girl, and I’m the host of the True Girl podcast.

Claire Black: This is True Girl, a podcast for girls and their moms. Together we’ll explore God’s truth for us one drive at a time. True Girl is designed for moms and daughters to listen together. It’s a perfect length for a car ride.

Dannah: We cover big topics in a way young hearts can understand. Topics like beauty.

Claire: Today our destination is not the grocery store or the ballet studio or school. We’re heading to the source of true beauty. Where does true beauty come from? We’ll have to drive much farther than the local mall, and don’t be disappointed, but we won’t be stopping at Claire’s.

You can’t even find true beauty on your favorite online shopping site. But by the end of this episode, you can understand that you are a masterpiece created by God.

True Girl is hosted by Dannah Gresh, author of Eight Great Days for Moms and Daughters. Let’s get moving. For season one, episode three, titled, “The Source of True Beauty.”

Dannah: Hey, girls! Today we want to talk about where our sense of true beauty comes from. I’m joined by lead teachers Staci Rudolph. Hey, Staci!

Staci Rudolph: Hey!

Dannah: Staci, tell me that there have been times in your life that you spent just a little too much time shopping online or obsessing about something you needed to wear so that you could feel, I don’t know, beautiful, confident, cool . . . call it whatever you will?

Staci: No, you are not the only one. I mean, you would have thought I had an obsession with Converse. I felt like I was not cool in school if I didn’t have the next pair of chucks. I don’t know what it was but . . . 

Dannah: Converse!

Staci: Yes, that was my thing.

Dannah: That was the thing.

Staci: My sneaker hit.

Dannah: Okay, when I was in sixth grade, you know what I needed?

Staci: What?

Dannah: Clogs . . . and they’re not even in style anymore! But I saved and I saved and I saved because I knew if I had this pair of clogs that I would be the coolest girl in school. Oh . . . if I could just have that money back.

Staci: Oh boy, times have changed.

Dannah: They have, and those clogs were painful.

Does this sound like something your tween would enjoy? I hope so. Head on over to ReviveOurHearts.com to listen to the rest of that episode. We’ll link it in today’s transcript.

The True Girl podcast is meant to be little drive-time nuggets of truth so that from the time you drive from home to church or from home to school, your daughter and you have together meditated a little bit on the truth of God’s Word.

Tomorrow join Nancy as she explains a phrase from Proverbs 14, “The wise woman builds her house.” Is this passage suggesting you’ve got to grab a hammer and nails and literally build your own place of residence to be a wise woman? Well, thankfully not. If so, I have a feeling many of us would be sleeping outside tonight. So what does it mean exactly? You’ll have to join us to find out. Please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.