From Panic to Purpose

Two years ago, I was absolutely freaking out.

The CCNNZ Awards Gala loomed ahead, and I'd been asked to step into a role that felt utterly terrifying. Not because of the responsibility itself, but because of what I thought it demanded of me. I had to be the "beautiful assistant." At least, that was the story playing loudly inside my head.

I had to purchase make-up, learn application techniques, and somehow transform myself into something polished and camera-ready in the space of a single week.

Looking back now, I realise the anxiety wasn't really about the make-up, was it? It was about worthiness. It was about whether I could ever be enough — beautiful enough, put-together enough, capable enough.

What strikes me now, looking at this photograph and remembering that frantic week, is how much grace has quietly rewired my understanding. Not simply my understanding of beauty, although that has shifted too. My understanding of what it actually means to show up.

Those cosmetics counters I nervously navigated taught me something I could not yet articulate: I didn't need to become someone else.

I'm still not a master at make-up. Allergies make regular application impossible, so I cannot build the kind of consistency that practice demands. There are days when my skin simply will not tolerate it. For years, I saw that limitation as a failure, another little piece of evidence in the case against me. Another way I wasn't "enough".

Yet I am learning something far more revolutionary: I am getting better at accepting myself as beautifully and wonderfully made, exactly as I am. Foundation or not. Polished or bare-faced. Made-up or simply me.

The "beautiful assistant" I feared I needed to become wasn't waiting to emerge from a make-up palette. She was already there. Not in the perfect application of products, but in the willingness to serve. To learn. To show up. To step into unfamiliar places authentically, carrying both my capability and my imperfection without believing one cancelled out the other.

That is where real beauty lives. In the surrender. In the acceptance. In the quiet knowing that my worth was never mine to construct.

Perhaps that is what these two years have really been teaching me. The mirror was never supposed to tell me who I am. Neither was the cosmetics counter. Neither was the camera. Neither was the Awards Gala. Neither was anybody else's definition of what a "beautiful assistant" ought to look like.

There is something particularly tender about the closing words of Psalm 139: "And that my soul knows very well." Perhaps that has been the journey. My head may have known that verse for years, while my soul was still learning how to believe it.

Two years ago, I stood at a cosmetics counter trying to learn how to make myself beautiful enough for the room I was about to enter. Today, I can look back at that woman with tenderness rather than embarrassment. She was trying so hard. She thought she needed to add something to herself before she could belong there. She did not yet fully understand that the God who made her had already settled the question of her worth.

The make-up was never the enemy. There is nothing wrong with enjoying beauty, colour, presentation or the delightful artistry of making ourselves look lovely. As an artist, I understand perhaps better than most the joy of colour and creativity. The freedom comes when beauty becomes something we express, rather than something we must prove.

I can wear make-up and still be me. I can go without it and still be me. I can walk into an elegant room beautifully dressed, or stand before God with absolutely nothing disguising the face He created, and neither version alters my value. My beauty is not something I manufacture. My worth is not something I apply. My identity is not something I earn. I am His.

Perhaps that is the most beautiful thing I have learned in these two years.