Our daughter-in-law adopted a young lady this week. (It was only temporary.) The young lady happened to mention to S. that she was entering a beauty competition for Miss Carroll County (AR) which was one of the competitions that launched S.’s beauty pageant experience!

DIL’s shop, Vintage Violet Boutique, sponsored this young lady in the 2014 competition held this week. The young lady earned (today) a 2nd runner up award. S. also posted a picture of herself (on FaceBook) that I’m borrowing here. I think this may have been the official Miss Carroll County picture from the year she won.

One of the reasons S. became involved in pageants was to earn money for her college education. With those earnings, she was able to put herself through school. She continued competing and won many other pageants, including Miss Hawaiian Tropic events. Her experiences in pageant events through the years makes her a great resource for young girls who also want to enter and do well in these competitions. S. loves to engage in this kind of instruction and she’s a great teacher!

That’s my DIL. Then there’s me. I’ve never been involved in a beauty pageant of any kind. (Truthfully, I always thought they were stupid … until I met my daughter-in-law and saw how valuable the experiences had been for her!)

Looking at DIL’s experience through my more-enlightened eyes, I see how the pageants helped her to develop poise, to think on her feet, and to comfortably express her bubbly personality while being scrutinized by beauty pageant judges. I’m pretty sure I’d have hated participating in the glare of those lights, but I see how it makes her the person she is today. She developed the confidence that enables her to take the risk of opening her own store (in a depressed economy) and to make it a successful endeavor!

It’s fair to say (if you hadn’t already guessed it!) that we’re genuinely proud of her!

Here’s one of the things though that makes all of her trophies dim in comparison:  her inner beauty outshines her physical beauty. She’s a lady as well. During some of the competitions she’s entered (say in Las Vegas and the Bahamas), she’s met numerous other contestants who’ve reflected an unfortunate lack of character. S. is nothing like those party girls. She’s deeply devoted to her husband, son and the rest of her extended family.

The beauty pageant circuit is obviously not for everyone, but my DIL enjoyed it and now she’s passing along her expertise to a new generation of competitors. In word and deed, she teaches these young women a lesson about where true beauty is rooted (from Proverbs 31:30):

Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain,
But a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised.