Meredith Flynn
When our girls were younger, The Jesus Storybook Bible was our bedtime reading on most nights. And the story they often chose was “The Girl No One Wanted,” about Jacob’s lesser-loved wife Leah and her long struggle to be valued.
In this version of the story, Sally Lloyd-Jones uses modern language to describe the differences between Leah and her sister Rachel, Jacob’s cherished wife. Rachel was the girl invited to every party and picked for every team, she writes. Leah, on the other hand, often went unnoticed. Some people even thought she was ugly.
The Leah story I knew growing up noted her “weak eyes” and put her in a very distant second place to her sister. Either version is a hard story, especially for girls who grow up fearing their “weak eyes” or any number of other physical attributes will hold them back or, worse, that their appearance somehow makes them less valuable, less worthy.
Our girls came back to it again and again, though, mostly drawn in by the story’s resolution. Leah wasn’t loved by her husband as whole-heartedly as her sister, Rachel, but in the end, she was still seen and loved and used by God. The names she chose for her first sons acknowledge that God saw her affliction and heard her, despite a lesser-than status in her sprawling, complicated family.
It’s a reminder God must have known we would need again and again. Several times in Scripture, we’re reminded of our tendency to judge a book by its cover, while God looks at the heart.
David didn’t compare well with his brothers, but God made him a king (1 Samuel 16:7).
Jesus “didn’t have an impressive form or majesty that we should look at him, no appearance that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2), but God has lifted him up and given him the name above every other (Philippians 2:9).
Don’t let your true beauty be outward, Peter warns in 1 Peter 3. Instead, focus on your heart.
In The Jesus Storybook Bible, the illustration on the last page of Leah’s chapter is her smiling, trailed by a parade of children God gave her—each a reminder that he keeps his promises. That our tendency to judge outer appearances is not how he operates. God is sovereign over all he has created, and his plans cannot be thwarted.
Meredith Flynn is a wife, mother of two, and writer living in Springfield. She and her family are active members of Delta Church.