6th Sunday Body Image

If I was given the opportunity to change my appearance, I would take it in an instant without hesitation. It doesn’t matter how much faith I have in God or how much love I have for Jesus, I still hate how much body hair I have, how terrible my skin is; I hate my body fat and big-boned frame, my thick wrists and stubby limbs. I even sometimes get angry enough about it to blame God, since He did, after all, make me this way. He could have made me beautiful by the world’s standards (He does it with so many other people), and He could have even made everyone that beautiful, but instead, He chose to let me be ugly, and I hate myself and His choice enough to wish every day that I was different, that I had the power to morph myself, or the money to pay for a surgeon to do it for me.

None of my precious Bible verses change the fact that I would change myself if I could. All they do is put balm on the bleeding sore that is my low self-esteem, and remind me that even though I am ugly in my own eyes, God loves me the way I am. Sometimes that’s enough to get me through the day, sometimes it’s not. I know I should appreciate myself more, be thankful for what I have, care more about my heart than my appearance, but I still end up wishing for beauty, even if it is stupid, superficial, and temporary. Beauty doesn’t last, and it doesn’t make you a good person or save your soul, so why should I care so much? Especially since I don’t want to get married or date?

I can’t explain it, except that I guess advertising and movies have brainwashed me with an indelible desire to be beautiful, whether it’s attainable or not, whether it’s real or not. I’ve tried so hard and so often to dig it out, to convince myself to think and believe otherwise, but it always comes back, like a disease: even if it goes into hibernation for a while, or if I think I’ve finally gotten it all out, if even just a tiny speck of it is left behind it will grow back to full-fledged self-loathing.

I would even wish for beauty rather than wish for a society that doesn’t care about beauty. I would change myself rather than the world. At least I feel that I would. I can’t believe how selfish this obsession has made me, and I hate it for it. Every time I see a girl who is beautiful, or skinnier than me, I ask God, “Why did you bless her, but not me? Why did she deserve it more than me?” And I figure, if I had grown up beautiful, I might have actually wanted to date, to waste my time and money on make-up and shopping and other beauty enhancers and obsessed over my appearance even more and wished for boys to like me and gotten distracted from school by going on dates. I saw it happen with other girls all the time, and I’m afraid it might have happened to me if I had been beautiful and confident in my appearance. But I was (am) not either, and so I am content to be alone. I expect and prefer it. And I don’t waste my time or effort trying to enhance a beauty that does not exist.

But even though I am comfortable, I still have anger toward my body and face that flames up sometimes. Often, lately, I have been able to believe that I don’t care about my appearance or how ugly I am, and be happy the way I am. But as I said, the jealous anger always comes back. Like today. And I guess this is when I need to get down on my face and pray to God for strength, wisdom, peace, and a change of heart. Because apparently God’s not in the business of outer cosmetic surgery: He just does an inside job.

(And of course this is going to lead to a post about wanting to eat right and nourish my body—taking care of the inside—rather than obsessing over the physical features that I can’t change and hating myself.)

Early Sunday: Be Open

34"A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." John 13:34-35

In my Christianity & Culture class this semester, we talked a lot about tolerance, which is the highest (actually, the only) virtue of moral relativism, which is basically the mindset much of the postmodern world has adopted. I can’t help but read Jesus’ words and worry that Christian love will get lost in all the tolerance and acceptance other people show. That is why I think that, personally, I want to be explicit about my love for God and my faith in Jesus Christ. I mean, I don’t want to beat people over the head, as it were, but I want to be so open about it that it just pours out of me, not as an attack, but as a joyful confession of my beliefs. And shouldn’t it be that way anyway? Shouldn’t Christians feel such an overwhelming joy that they can’t help but talk about it?

Not that we have to be happy all the time, and not that we have to limit our conversations to only religious topics, but if we are strong in our faith, it should be something that is constantly with us, supporting us, filling us up. When we are down, we seek solace in it. When we are up, we find glory in it. When we are in doubt, we wrestle with it. We can’t escape it, and we don’t want to. We want to get deeper with it, and become so comfortable with it that expressing it—our faith and love for God—is as natural as breathing. I know it can seem awkward at times to bring up the word “God” or “Jesus” and sometimes I might stutter or pause while I work up the nerve, but I want to work past that. I want these to flow out of me so that people can hear and sense how easy it is for me to bring it up.

Talking about things tends to make them seem more concrete, so discussing something that is mainly based on faith can show that you view it as something more, as something “real” and almost physical or tangible. A lot of people view their faith as just something abstract, something separate from their real life, and they may not even think about it too seriously except for Sunday mornings, if even that. It’s just a kind of vague notion that they don’t see as really important, and it may not even occur to them to try to figure out how strongly they believe it.

But Jesus Christ is so much more than a vague notion: He is meant to be a person’s everything. He is the thing a person should drop everything for, give up their life in service for. That’s anything but a vague notion. He is very real, and His influence and power is incredibly strong. When a Christian gets to know Him at the level where they feel Him and want to know Him more, and want to do work for Him and want to share Him with others, that’s when you know He is not a religion that is just one compartment of life: He is life itself, so how can you not talk about Him? That is not meant to be an accusation, it’s an honest question. How can any Christian go one day without talking either about or to God? I do sometimes, and it’s weird to me. I feel like, for all that Christ has done for me and the rest of the world, for all that He IS, shouldn’t He come up more in my daily life?

Well, I would like Him to, so it’s my goal to kind of condition myself to be more forthcoming in my faith, because really, I do feel great joy from knowing Christ, and I feel like I’m hiding something by not letting it come out more naturally. Especially in this time where any kind act could be interpreted or motivated by simple tolerance of others, I think it is important that Christians prove we can show love and compassion to the people in our daily lives and not only in church or on a big mission trip. This life is a mission trip, and we are supposed to be identifiable be the love we show to others, the way Christians in the very beginning were. Now tolerance is just expected because of the big emphasis on individual rights, so Christians first of all need to start showing love to others rather than the radical hatred and prejudice that we have become known for, and second of all to be open about why we show such love, so that people can actually associate our actions with our faith.

That may put a high standard on us to start acting better in public—because once people know you are a Christian they will start watching you to see if you act the same loving way all the time—but is that really a bad thing? Shouldn’t we hold ourselves to a higher standard of living? We don’t have to feel like failures if we are not saints, but we should monitor ourselves so that we can catch ourselves before we do something we shouldn’t, like cheat or steal or explode with anger. If we can be more conscious of our actions and turn what we might have done into something positive and have that reputation of being a Christian, then I have a feeling people would notice that we are trying harder to live out what we preach, which would make a huge difference in others’ perceptions.

So yeah, being open about our faith might be worrisome at first because of the pressure to be better in public, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing since it will make you more aware of how you act, and if you are serious about your faith, I think you will want to live a life of love and justice.

You can have personality, I’m not trying to say we should all be little cookie-cutter angels, not at all. By all means, let your character shine! We need diversity to reach all the different types of people in the world and to prove that Christ can live in any one and that anyone can love through Christ. This is getting into the realm of the theoretical and a scope that is way too broad for my musings here, but I just believe that in order for Christians, who come in all sorts of fun flavors of personality, to be identified, we need to be loving AND open about our faith, because atheists can be good and tolerant people and a lot less worried about their reputation since they’re not trying to represent anything. But we are, and I for one want to make a good impression for Him.