6

from accepting to embracing

Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.

—St. Augustine

“Do you love your hips?”

The question threw me. Why in the name of all that is holy would I love my hips? The woman standing in front of me at the conference where I had just spoken was waiting for my answer. She repeated herself. “Do you love your hips? ’Cuz Jesus is not gonna heal you till you love your hips!”

Oy. Of all the things not to love about myself, I hadn’t given much thought to my hips, but thinking of them in that moment, I could definitely say no, I did not love my hips.

The woman was telling me the truth. She was saying, God wants you to love and enjoy everything about yourself right now and embrace the truth that you are a beautiful woman regardless of your measurements. Until we can do that, we will not be moving forward. Or downward, as the case may be.

It’s a difficult thing to stand in front of a mirror naked and tell yourself how marvelous your body is. It is contrary to every broken thing in a woman’s soul and in this broken world. But I began to do it. Not so God would change my body, f-i-n-a-l-l-y. But so that I could begin to align the way I see myself with the way he does.

I began one evening in the bathtub by thanking God for my legs. I told myself I had fabulous legs. “I haven’t been so kind to you, legs, but we’ve been through a lot together and you’ve brought me far. Thank you, legs. You’re awesome.”

And on like that. It became a practice. I stumbled a bit when I came to my arms. I still struggle with the arms. But okay, I’m going to do it right now. “Thank you, God, for these amazing arms. They work and lift things and hold people and open jars and steer wheels and pick up all kinds of things. Wow. I’m sorry for neglecting you, arms. You really are something else.”

beautiful now

One wonderful summer day last year, I was driving to Denver, rendezvousing with my husband at the wedding of some dear friends’ son. I was wearing a pretty dress that I particularly loved. Wanting to look extra nice, underneath the dress I was wearing a modern-day girdle, a suck-you-in-all-over-so-you-can’t-breathe-but-your-torso-will-be-smooth torture device.

In my own mother’s day, and in many days before her, the device was a lace-up girdle. My mother wore one regularly. Most women of her generation did, just as so many women of our generation wear the newfangled version. My mom once told me the story of her grandmother’s sister immigrating to the United States from Germany. She was coming over from Europe on a ship (of course), and wanting to look her best, she wore her corset. She wore her corset the entire two weeks. She wore her corset as cinched as she could get it. She wore her corset so cinched that it prevented her from being able to go to the bathroom, and by the end of the journey to the New World, she was dead. Because of her corset. True story. Oh sister, what price beauty?

Honestly, how many women have died in the quest to attain some just-out-of-reach level of beauty? It is a tragically high number.

So I was driving to Denver, wearing the hateful undergarment, when it became so painful I could barely breathe. It was driving into my ribs. I guess it’s made for wearing while you are standing up, not sitting down for an hour behind a wheel. Thankfully, I was able to hoist my skirt up and get a hand underneath and pull the girdle thingy away from my body. But seriously, it took all my strength. I made a fist and let it press against that. Driving with one hand, at least I could breathe. But I needed to keep switching hands every few minutes because the thing was so unbelievably strong and tight.

And by the way, it was a size larger than I was currently wearing. So it’s not that I had on the wrong size. It’s that the things are supposed to strangle your body into a size or two smaller. Seriously now, why do we feel the need to do this to ourselves? What is so horrific about bumps? Please tell me. We are killing ourselves figuratively and literally to fit into the world’s definition of what we are supposed to be.

My mother used to say, “Beauty before pain!”—meaning, being beautiful is more important than not feeling terrible. High heels with our toes pinched into the pointy tip. Spanx. Waxing. Trimming. Plucking. P-a-y-i-n-g.

One of the assignments my mother gave me as the youngest daughter in my family was to pluck the coarse black hairs protruding from her chin whenever she was no longer able to see them or care. She made me promise not to leave her to this indignity. She was a nurse who often tended older women, and she grieved for those whose personal grooming was ignored. My mom was well acquainted with those pesky little black hairs. She had a magnifying mirror in which she would look to peruse and destroy any interlopers. Pluck! Pluck! Pluck!

At about the age of thirty, I made the mistake of looking at myself in her well-lit magnifying mirror. WHAAAAT? Oh my gosh! Why did no one tell me I had a beard? Where are the tweezers? I was horrified. Are you kidding me? What was unseen to the mere human eye, or just by looking in a regular mirror—even up close—was magnified to werewolf proportions in my mother’s mirror.

Pluck. Pluck. Pluck.

When my mother died, I got her mirror. I was hooked. Only some women know the satisfaction of a victorious plucking episode. When her mirror finally broke, I bought myself a new one. A bigger one. A better lit one. I encouraged my husband to look into it once and use it to pluck those nose hairs that seem to multiply as one gets older, and when he looked, he screamed. “Good grief! What? I’m a Wookie!” (A Wookie is a very tall creature covered completely with hair, found in the Star Wars movies. Chewbacca, Han Solo’s trusted friend, is a Wookie. My husband, John, is not a Wookie. Except when looking in a very intense magnifying mirror.)

My husband had the good sense to know that the magnifying mirror wasn’t reality. It isn’t what anyone else sees. He refuses to look in it ever again, and he is urging me to throw the thing away. I have told him that throwing it away is in my future. But I’m not ready yet.

Maybe I’ll be ready when I’ve attained a hair-free status. Or better, maybe I’ll throw it away when my soul more fully embraces the truth of what God says about me. God has been inviting me to throw the magnifying mirror away and be free, free from gazing at my multiple imperfections in my face and in my soul and instead to believe the reflection he is showing me. Honestly, the only reflection that really matters is the reflection we see in his loving and joyous eyes. What does he see? What does he say? He says we are beautiful now.

How beautiful you are, my darling!

Oh, how beautiful!

Your eyes behind your veil are doves. (Song 4:1)

Jesus is inviting us to relax into the beauty he has bestowed upon us and cease striving to attain a level of smooth perfection that looks wonderful on a doll or on a magazine cover but is not attainable in the living, breathing realm of humanity. God does not tell us that the goal is perfection. Perfection in any vital area of our life is not going to happen. There, I said it. Now, we can improve. We can grow. We can become more loving, more grace filled, more merciful. We are no longer bound to sin, slaves to its din of temptation. We are still going to sin. But we don’t have to. The secret is Jesus.

Our hope doesn’t rest on our finally getting it together. Our hope rests in Jesus. Jesus in us. It’s Christ in us, the hope of glory. Paul says, “To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27). We won’t be perfect on this side of heaven. But Jesus is perfect. Always. We are becoming more holy and true. Jesus already is. His name isn’t “Becoming.” It is “I Am.” Perfection isn’t the goal. Jesus is.

God help me, one day soon I am going to break that mirror.

In the Song of Songs, God says,

Let me hear your voice;

for your voice is sweet,

and your face is lovely. (Song 2:14)

Lovely. Now isn’t that a good word? The more I believe God, the lovelier I actually become. I rest in it. Oh, to not be a grasping, clutching, striving, unsatisfiable woman. God says I am, you are, lovely. Right at this very moment. Really. Breathe that in!

Every woman has a beauty unique unto herself. I have seen beauty in virtually every woman I have ever met regardless of skin type, body shape, hair color, teeth whiteness, or number on the scale. Every woman is beautiful. You are beautiful. I am beautiful. Though I have recognized it in other women for as long as I can remember, I have only begun to see it in myself. Yes, I believe I am beautiful. Some days. Well, some moments. God help us all to believe it more deeply and more often. Because in the places where we don’t believe it, we continue to shame ourselves. And shame will never be an agent of change.

trying to fit in

I became a Christian when I was a senior in college and had hit rock bottom. I was a disaster, powerless to change and hopeless that I ever could. I hated myself, hated the choices I had made, the things I had done, and the person I had become. It was misogyny aimed by myself straight at myself—cheered on by the Evil One. In the depths of my brokenness, Jesus whispered longing for himself into my heart.

I really love my testimony. I love the miracle of it and the role my husband played in it. I was home from college one weekend, and John came over for a visit and told me of his coming to faith in Christ. Now this was huge news. I knew that John had been seeking spiritually for years, but he seemed to be seeking only in the most, shall we say, unconventional ways. His faith in Jesus was the biggest turnaround I had ever seen. Spiritually hungry myself, I loved hearing John talk about God and the Bible. My spirit quickened, and over a period of months I gave my heart and my life to Jesus as well.

But back at college John remained the only Christian I knew, and he lived two and a half hours away.

I knew I needed people of faith in my life, and I knew of only one place to find them. In the quad area of the university I attended, clubs set up tables advertising their events and recruiting members. I had seen a large table many times with a sign on it that irked my militant feminist heart. “Fishers of Men,” it read. Campus Crusade for Christ had a table inviting people to sign up for Bible studies. I really hated that sign. What about women?

But I was desperate. I stealthily approached the table, moving from post to post, gaining the courage to sign up to be in a Bible study. The woman behind the table was very kind, very warm. She was also wearing polyester plaid pants and a polyester knit top. Honestly, to me she looked like she had just stepped out of Leave It to Beaver, and I looked like the hippy I was: gauze skirt, Birkenstocks, unshaven legs, and Indian top. (What happened to that top? It was awesome.)

The point of this story is what I believed about myself while meeting this woman for the first time. I saw her and thought, I’m going to have to dress like that now. I believed that in becoming a Christian I needed to lay down who I was. More than simply laying down what I did, I thought I had to turn my back on what I liked, my tastes, my desires, my heart. After all, weren’t they all sinful?

I was serious about my Jesus. He had grabbed hold of my heart and I had grabbed hold of his, and like a drowning woman clinging to a life preserver, I was not going to let go. If that meant I changed how I dressed completely, then so be it. If that meant I killed or ignored everything about me, then fine.

Now, part of our sanctification does mean we change. We let go of aspects of ourselves, even the ways we dress that don’t make God happy or reflect who we really are as his beloved. We don’t dress immodestly, because we are precious and holy and deeply loved. We don’t cheat on our taxes or steal from the grocery store or spend our Friday nights drinking until we pass out. But we do grow increasingly into who we uniquely are in Christ.

However, I abandoned something else, something essential to me. By so readily abandoning my likes and dislikes, I came to not trust my intuition. I buried what I was drawn to and instead took all my cues from others. How I dressed. What to give as a birthday present. Which pillow to buy for the chair. What color to paint the room. Putting on spiritual and emotional Spanx, I tried to squeeze myself into what I believed was a more acceptable form.

I didn’t just lose myself in Christ. I rejected myself.

And that’s the opposite of what Jesus does.

embracing

People are weird. Well, I’m not—but everyone else is. The definition of normal for most of us is “me.” It is actually helpful to acknowledge the truth that we are just as quirky as everyone else and that God loves quirky! He loves you! He has a fabulous sense of humor, and he adores yours. (He always gets your jokes even if no one else does!)

He made you you—on purpose. You are the only you—ever. Becoming ourselves means we are actively cooperating with God’s intention for our lives, not fighting him or ourselves. God accepts us right at this moment, and he wants us to accept ourselves as well. He looks at us with pleasure and with mercy, and he wants us to look at ourselves with pleasure and mercy too! Accepting who we are includes accepting and being thankful for our imperfect bodies, but it isn’t limited to that. We can accept other truths about ourselves. Our personality is our own. Our story is our own. Our taste is our own. The way we have chosen to self-protect is ours. We have a style of relating, a kind of sin we easily fall prey to, and a favorite way to spend a free afternoon. We already are ourselves. Unique. (Cookie cutters only work well for cookies.)

God not only accepts us, he embraces us. Embracing ourselves is a stretch for most of us, but consider: Jesus commands us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. How can we love our neighbor as ourselves if we do not love ourselves? How can we become joyful women if we are unable to see the humor in our own folly? We do become even more ourselves as we repent of areas in our lives that have nothing to do with faith or love, but God does not live in a perpetual state of disappointment over who we are. Berating ourselves for our flaws and our weakness only serves to undermine our strength to become.

Repenting from our sin is essential.

Beating ourselves up for sinning is no longer an option.

Embracing ourselves has nothing to do with arrogance or settling for a lower version of who we are. Embracing ourselves has everything to do with embracing the goodness of God’s creative work in us. It means trusting God, believing that all he has made is glorious and good. And that includes us. You are the only one who can be you. The world, the kingdom of God, and all those around you need you to embrace who you are created to be as you become more fully your true self.

So who are you? Well, a great way to discover the answer to that is simply to ask, what do you like? What would you do with your life if you were free to do anything at all?

dreaming with God

When I was a little girl, I dreamed of riding the range with the sheriff, bringing justice to the West and rounding up the bad guys. I can still see what I imagined I would be wearing: a white leather skirt and a white vest edged with fringe. I also had on matching white cowboy boots and a white hat. Yee haw!

And since I am being honest, I might as well confess that I am one of those people who used to practice her Academy Award acceptance speech in front of the mirror. Standing at the bathroom sink, thirteen years old, I practiced looking both humble and startled. “I just want to thank all the little people who brought me here.”

I’ve let those desires go. They have grown and shifted but remain expressions of the same core desire. I no longer dream of being a movie star or riding the range, but I do long to make an impact. I do long for Justice.

About fourteen years ago in a small group, John shared some thoughts about desire, that core place in our hearts where God speaks, and then he invited us to write down what we wanted. To write a long list. Not to edit it. Nothing was too small or large to write down. My list turned out to be two pages long and had things on it as varied as the garden I wanted to nurture, the hope to ride horses with my husband, the healing I longed for a few dear ones to experience, and the wedding of a single friend I wanted to dance at.

I found that list a few years ago, and to my astonishment every single item had come true. It had happened!

I needed to make a new list! I have. Don’t you want to be on it?

God dreams big. And he invites us to dream big with him. God has planted dreams and desires in each one of our hearts, and they are unique to us. Opening up our spirits, our minds, our heart, our imaginations to what we would really like—to even the possibility of wanting—allows the Holy Spirit to awaken parts of ourselves that are in such a deep sleep no dreams are happening.

God is a Dreamer. He has dreams of you and for you.

When we dream with God, we don’t want to run to thinking, How can I make this happen? Dreaming with God isn’t about how. It’s about what. If anything could happen, then what would I love to see happen in my life? What would I love to see happen in the lives of those I love? It’s really much easier to dream for other people, to have desires for our children and our friends. We can fairly easily name what we want their lives to look like, the healing and the freedom we’d love for them to come to know. It’s a wee bit more difficult to dream for our own lives.

But this book is about your heart. This moment is about your dreams and your desires that contribute to the unique, marvelous woman you are. The point is not so much being able to name the desire as it is to allow God to access the places in our hearts where dreams and desires are planted. God speaks to us there. About himself. About ourselves.

It’s okay to want, and it’s okay to want more. Wanting more has nothing to do with being unsatisfied or lacking in your present reality. It’s being open to the more that God wants to bring to you in your own life. The possibilities for you are limitless! They are. Yes, they are. Maybe not for tomorrow but for your life.

What is pushing it with God? What can’t he do? What is too hard for him to accomplish in your relationships, your achievements, your creativity, in the fullness of the expression of who you are? We want to be women who are continuing to grow all our lives. We never want to stop. Yes, we rest. But a heart alive is a heart that is awake and curious and pressing in to more.

what do you want?

People who regularly write down their dreams and desires earn nine times as much over their lifetimes as people who don’t. Most Americans (80 percent) say they don’t have any dreams, and we can imagine why. Life can suck the dreaming right out of you. The living God wants to pour those dreams back in. Sixteen percent of Americans say they do have dreams, but they don’t write them down. Four percent have dreams and desires, and write them down, but less than 1 percent review and update them on a regular basis.1

It is the people who allow themselves to dream, who own their dreams, who write them down and look at them periodically, whose life dreams are coming true.

It’s good to dream. We can’t out-give God. We can’t out-love him, and we can’t out-dream him. Give yourself permission to dream big! Dream deep. Dream wide.

Because the thing about dreams is, dreams come true.

I have dreams today that are large and varied. On my list are things like: I want to grow tomatoes in a pot and make an amazing tres leches cake. I want to be able to get on a horse without using a block. I want to write a book for women, and I want it to be really helpful to many. There are people I want to see come to Christ, countries I want to travel to and minister in, and a size I want to wear.

I have longings and dreams for my husband and for my sons and for our relationships. I want to learn to take really good pictures and capture the beauty that captures my eye. I want to be strong. I want to know the heart of God intimately. I want his life to fill me and flow through me powerfully and joyfully. I want to find out how deeply I can dive into the vastness of his love—how much of his heart can I know?

There are some dreams that come true here, on this side of heaven. As in, I’m pretty sure that one day I am going to be able to grow tomatoes. And there are some that will simply continue to unfold, like really knowing the heart of God.

I encourage you to risk dreaming and writing your dreams down. Once you get started, you’ll find there are things you want. And if you can’t get started, another approach is simply to begin listing the things you like. What do you like? From coffee to the fragrance of lilacs to a comforter before a fire to karaoke, it’s a nourishing discipline simply to become aware of what you enjoy and to write it down.

It’s good to sit with God in the quiet and ask him to reveal to you: what do I want? And ask him, what do you want for me? I do know that one of the things he wants is your heart to become more alive, more awake, and more aware of your own inner workings and his pleasure over who you are. Today. Right in this moment. Who you are fleshes out in what you want.

Awakening and owning the dreams that God has placed in our hearts isn’t about getting stuff or attaining something. It’s about embracing who we are and who he has created us to be. In him. He is our dream come true, and the one true love of our life. But we can’t love him with our whole hearts when our hearts are asleep. To love Jesus means to risk coming awake, to risk wanting and desiring.

Writing down your dreams and desires is good and is just between you and God. You can share your dreams with someone in your life who you know will handle your heart well, but you don’t have to. Let your want-o-meter go off the charts. It is not even remotely connected to your dissatisfied-o-meter.

There is a reason you have the desires you do. Some desires you share with many others. Many people want the same core, good things: a community, a relationship, a deeper walk with God. But many of your dreams and desires are yours alone. They have been given to you by God for you to awaken to, embrace, nurture, pursue, and then offer. Let God use your dreams to guide you into the fuller expression of your unfolding glorious self!

We need to increasingly live from the fullness of our whole hearts in order to become who we are meant to be and play the significant role that is ours to play. We want to be awake and alert. We want to be women who live their lives on purpose.

God gives us our dreams, and we give them back to him. By dreaming and writing them down, we aren’t demanding they come true. We are just owning the reality that they are a part of us. And since they are a part of us, we embrace them.

Jesus, come. Guide me. Holy Spirit, fill me. Dream with me and in me. Help me to unlock the desires you have planted in my heart and to write them down. Help me to dream big.

Ask yourself:

What would I love to do? What would I love to experience or create or offer?

What do I want to be really good at?

What do I want with God? What does God want with me?

What do I want to be known for?

Nothing is impossible with God. Nothing is too good to be true. And besides, if you don’t have a dream, how can you have a dream come true?

my pants

A few years ago I came home from a hair appointment, and honestly my hair looked fantastic. I don’t know what my hairdresser does, but the day she does my hair, it’s amazing. I can never replicate it. On this particular day I looked in the mirror and saw fabulous hair, and I felt pretty. I felt pretty. We all know that can be a rare occurrence!

I had a meeting to go to in a couple of hours, so I changed into more work-appropriate attire: a pair of nicer jeans. I love these jeans. I don’t know what it is about them, but they work. I put on a red top and big turquoise earrings. Not my usual go-to outfit, but I loved it.

As soon as I was dressed, a friend dropped by unexpectedly, and when she saw me she stopped dead in her tracks and exclaimed, “You are inhabiting your beauty!”

I was inhabiting my beauty. I had worn the jeans before, the top before, and probably the earrings with them, but something in my spirit had relaxed and I was embracing being myself, a woman who believed God when he said, “You are lovely.”

My friend left and John came home, and he had the same reaction to me that my friend did, and let’s just say that the outfit came off and had to come back on again before the meeting. (It’s okay. We’re married! It’s a good thing!)

I wasn’t squeezing into the pants by the use of an elastic torture device, nor was I squeezing my soul into any other prescribed form. Rather, I was inhabiting my beauty, just being me and embracing who that is. It might have been for the first time, but please Jesus, not for the last. Some reading this may say, “Those jeans must be amazing and looked really great on you, but I don’t look good in any pair of jeans.”

Can I just tell you that those jeans are a size 24? Those fabulous, awesome, man-I-love-these-pants are a size 24. I can be fully dressed these days and pull them on over my clothes, and they drop to the ground. I am no longer a size 24, but I pray to inhabit my beauty as well as I did on that monumental day. On every level.

I was recently at a church luncheon for the women’s ministry, and one table was filled with older women. Two were ninety, and one was celebrating her ninety-third birthday that very day. Their hair was coiffed, and they were dressed so nicely, makeup applied, and having so much fun I just wanted to be at their table. To say that our beauty as women peaks somewhere in our twenties is laughably absurd. Yes, there is a vibrant beauty to youth, but these women—these much older women—were stunning.

They had wrinkles and gray hair. No Botox or lip filler or liposuction could erase their years. But they had something else much more beautiful than youth. They had hearts that had been cultivated by faith over decades. They had a light shining from their eyes that all the sorrow and pain and loss they had undoubtedly endured could not extinguish. They loved God and their hearts were alive and there is nothing more gorgeous than that.

God says our latter glory will exceed our former. To our great loss, in our society we no longer value the wisdom and expertise that comes through living well through many years. Silver hair and wrinkles are earned.

I have learned that being beautiful, feeling lovely, and enjoying who we uniquely are have absolutely nothing to do with our weight, our age, or the shape of our bodies. Take that in a moment and try it on for size. Let the possibility of that being true settle into your spirit for a moment before you quickly dismiss the idea. Beauty is not about the hair, the clothes, the marital status, the bank account, or the number on the scale. Being beautiful is a quality of spirit recognized primarily in a woman whose soul is at rest because she believes her God when he calls her lovely. She is no longer striving to reach the world’s unattainable standards of beauty and acceptance but instead is receiving the inheritance that is hers as an image bearer of the living God. She is embracing who God has made her to be.

You are a stunner. And the more you grow in knowing God, the more you will love him, and the more his life and his beauty will inhabit you and flow out from your unique, fabulous, embraceable self.

Go ahead and take a good long look in the mirror. Tell yourself you are a knockout. God says you are, and well, he ought to know.

note

1. Dan Zadra and Kristel Wills, 5: Where Will You Be Five Years from Today? (Seattle: Compendium, 2009), 9.