Real Beauty

Today I stumbled across a discussion board on "real beauty" where a woman wrote that she cannot think of one attractive feature about herself. She painted a brief physical picture of herself (which sounded frighteningly similar to the way I look--short, fair skin, freckles) and then described how she would prefer to look--tall, tan, larger bust--not surprisingly very much the way Hollywood would also prefer that she and every other American woman look. As I was reading her brief post, I first felt empathy for her knowing that I used to feel the same way about my appearance and admittedly still do on occasion. I then felt my heart fill with praise at how God has brought me to a place where I can see beauty in even the parts of myself that I once thought were irrevocably flawed--my short but powerful legs, my freckled face that reflects my love of the outdoors, my wide feet that faithfully carry my body and my burdens. I praise God for this because it took a good chunk of my teens and twenties to get to a point where I am no longer incessantly raging against the genetics God gave to me. After praising Him, I then felt indignation at the enemy for the plight of the woman who posted the comments about her body and all my sisters who struggle against this attack of the enemy.

How much time and money and energy do women in this culture waste on trying to reach an unreachable standard of appearance? The multi-billion dollar diet and beauty industry daily send us the enemy's message that we are not good enough, that our worth can be measured on a bathroom scale, that our physical is more important than our spiritual. The industry does so under the guise that they are trying to meet our needs and desires, but really they are creating artificial needs and desires through their advertising. And so many of us gladly buy in. We overstuff our bodies until we are completely hidden behind layers of fat or we starve our bodies until the emptiness in our eyes barely hints at the life than once lurked behind them. The enemy is crushing out the fire in the hearts of women with his war on our beauty. He is instilling in us at young ages that it's better to reflect the airbrushed, plastic beauty of Hollywood than the real beauty of our Lord. The God who created us deeply values diversity in all ways, including physical appearance. Our enemy would prefer for us to reject God's creation and seek to become clones because he knows full well that our efforts to measure up to the impossible image of beauty that our culture has adopted will only drive us further away from God. Obsessive diet and beauty efforts draw our time away from the Lord's service, and they also sap our energy and strength and even our passion away from Him to whom all of these things should be directed. Do not be mistaken, Satan claps his hands with glee as he watches us expend ourselves on ourselves rather than on the Lord.

I mourn for all the years of my life I've wasted on the pursuit of the world's beauty. Frankly, the time has left me exhausted. During therapy in college, I read in a book about body image that we should only engage in exercise that brings us life--not punishment, not compulsion, not pain, but life. These words stuck with me even though I never really learned how to practice them. The problems I have now with my knee can be directly linked to the hours I have spent punishing myself with intense cardio after I ate the "wrong" thing. The pain in my knee reminds me daily of the price I paid to my enemy in hopes of fitting a certain physical mold. My heart grieves over this in my own life just as my heart grieves at the pain that all my sisters feel after giving themselves over to a greedy enemy who never satisfies. My prayer is that we might all recognize the pure beauty God has instilled in each of us, that we might start to appreciate our own unique beauty and the unique beauty of our sisters, that we might spend our time cultivating God's beauty in our hearts rather than the world's beauty on our bodies, and that we might spur each other on towards victory over an enemy whom our culture has given far too much power to in this (and every) area.