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Look through the Divine View-Master

Beauty is the mystery hidden in each of us waiting to be found.

—Adrienne Sandvos

If we’re willing, I think God will divulge to us—one by one—the places and spaces where we are captive. If we want to know. If we want to be free.

Of course, if we open ourselves up to learning more about these spaces and places, if we decide to turn toward our own captivity and hiding, we’re likely welcoming a giant ordeal. You know, a real ruckus. Sometimes it’s easier just to look the other way. And yet, tiptoeing around them is, I’m finding, worse. Sometimes Brazen Work means bobbing for time bombs.

Our friend Ken asked me with a hint of skepticism, “Leeana, are you a shoe girl?”

I hesitated and then bobbled the answer because it was so completely clear and unclear to me at the same time.

You know those moments when someone puts their finger on something you’ve been trying to avoid and pretend about. And you think you’ve done a pretty good job keeping your own smoke and mirrors going and then someone, unknowingly, outs you.

Throughout my dating career—which was spotty and strained—I managed to look primarily for men who were as close to six foot five as I could find them. I was always drawn to hulking guys. I can say, confidently, that being with supersized men made me feel (1) taken care of and (2) small. Two things I believed men could offer me.

When you’re a woman with big hands and big feet and broad shoulders and, let’s just say, an “athletic build,” it feels good to feel miniature next to someone else. It feels good to feel both childlike and also petite. It feels good to be physically reduced.

And then Steve and I met, and in a whirlwind, we were engaged. He was not—physically anyway—the kind of guy I usually picked. He is exactly one inch taller than me. He is certainly very muscular and fit but not hulking, per se. I am not significantly smaller than he is. In fact, to the naked eye, there is probably no perceivable height difference between us. And if I wear shoes with any kind of heel and he wears his annoyingly paper-thin flip-flops, then—you guessed it—I am taller.

In the beginning, I looked past all this. I was interested in his intensity and wooed by his unwavering pursuit of me. I put aside my “type” and listened to the voices that said sometimes God brings you what you least expect, in the packages you least expect them, which is true.

Right after we were married, we moved overseas for Steve’s job, and as we were in the final stages of packing, I lined up all my shoes and decided—perhaps subconsciously—to give away the pairs with the highest heels.

I gave my sister some red wedges that I loved.

For the longest time I was a shoe horse. In fact, on volleyball trips in high school and college, I would always take two bags: one with clothes, one with shoes. So it surprised me—stopped me, actually—when Ken asked me if I was a “shoe girl.”

“Of course I’m a shoe girl, Ken. How is that not completely obvious?”

But I realized I had stopped being a shoe girl since Steve and I got married. Shoes have represented a major dilemma for me. I stopped buying shoes I loved because I didn’t want to risk appearing taller than Steve. I stopped wearing shoes I loved because I let my self-consciousness around our height difference override my own taste.

I have badgered myself by thinking things like, A more mature woman wouldn’t care, wouldn’t notice, wouldn’t think about something so trivial. A more secure woman would flaunt her height with six-inch heels. A more self-possessed woman wouldn’t go to such trouble to try to be so small.

And maybe all that’s true. But here I am: insecure, caring, noticing.

I watched a TED Talk by Amy Cuddy about the science behind our nonverbal communication, specifically the power dynamics associated with our posture. Her research shows that when we try to make ourselves smaller physically—by hunching, collapsing in on ourselves, crossing our arms in front of us, crossing our legs—our desire to be more diminutive literally affects our hormonal composition, making us feel less powerful. Conversely, when we open up our bodies and occupy more space with our arms and legs, this shift in posture also affects our hormones—specifically an increase in testosterone (dominance hormone) and a decrease in cortisol (stress hormone). When we expand our bodies for two minutes, we literally feel more powerful and less stressed.

Crazy, right?

Cuddy’s research also includes nonverbal communication as it relates to gender, and—you guessed it—women tend to chronically feel less powerful than men and therefore try to make their bodies appear smaller more often than men do.

For those of you who have spent any amount of time trying to be small in life—silent, apologetic, shamed, opinionless, miniature—you get how a girl could go through her whole life wearing flats while all she can think about are those red wedges.

When Ken asked me about the shoes, I had to confront what I thought I was managing just fine. The truth is, I’ve given up parts of myself to feed an anxiety. Deeper still, I’m not experiencing a sense of spaciousness around my own body. Not completely. And, frankly, I want to spend time thinking about other things. I want to spend my precious minutes thinking about something other than how I can look smaller in relation to Steve.

God whispers to me, “Don’t put your best energy toward contempt, self-consciousness. Don’t spend your time feeding the Soul Bullies. Put your best energy toward loving and holding and creating and dancing and laughing.”

Always calling us to deeper freedom.

I would like to feel a greater sense of comfort in my own skin, and not as it is defined in relation to someone else’s skin but because I have done the harrowing work of making peace with my personhood. If I’m looking to Steve’s height as the source of my own sense of beauty, then I’m sunk. Steve will never be tall enough to heal me. I will never find flat-enough flats to heal me. The work must be done from the inside out.

If it’s true that love drives out fear, then I want nothing short of radical acceptance, radical love. For my body and for Steve’s body. When shame is my lens, my eyes are unreliable. I need the Divine View-Master—so I can see myself as I was meant to be seen.

When we’re living out of shame, perceived shortcomings are our absolute demise. We have to protect ourselves from giving the world any evidence that we are not good enough.

When we’re living from our Created Center, we don’t have to worry if someone sees a chink in our armor. We don’t have to be so self-protected. We don’t have to blameshift. We don’t have to lie. We don’t have to spend our entire life in flats if we don’t truly want to. We can stand in the nakedness of our humanity and not be ashamed. We can tell the truth because we have come to believe that nothing about our externals determines our worth.

This is really hard, though, right?

Sometimes I wonder if God’s saying, “Yeah, I got it, you’re not perfect. But do you know you are beautiful?” Do you? Do I? Do we believe we are actually, in our own mysterious ways, beautiful?

I heard Glennon Melton speak recently on the topic of being beautiful. Here’s her theory: Beautiful means being full of beauty. Every time you observe beauty, you are filling yourself up with more and more and more beauty. Someone who is beautiful, then, is someone who fills up on beauty in this world whenever and wherever she finds it—enjoying the sea, reading to her kids, holding hands on a hike, laughing till she cries, ingesting poetry like it’s protein.

Many of us have internalized the idea that being beautiful means taking up the smallest amount of space possible. Mary Pipher talks about the danger of this notion in her book Reviving Ophelia. She believes part of anorexia, in her estimation, is a message to the world that says, “I will take up only a small amount of space. I won’t get in the way.”1

Whenever I wrestle with my own qualms about my body, I am immediately reminded of the four female eyes staring up at me in my home. Will I teach these girls how to take up their God-appointed space in this world? With dignity. With beauty. With self-possession. They will watch me to know how to do this. They will watch me play small. Or they will watch me occupy space. They will determine how to feel about their bodies by listening to me talk about mine, watching me hide mine.

This is no joke.

I watch the two of them and learn from them too. During a recent misty rain, three-year-old Elle runs into the house while I’m putting away groceries. The next thing I know she is standing in the courtyard outside our front door, wearing not one stitch, arms stretched out above her, in a rain-induced trance. Naked and unashamed. Glimpses of the garden lost.

Sometimes I practice being taller than Steve. He’ll wear those deeply problematic flip-flops to church and I’ll deliberately put on a four-inch wedge. I stand next to him, singing, feeling uncomfortable. Like a gigantor-girl–Goliath.

The only thing I know to do is to keep welcoming the discomfort instead of avoiding it. I just keep practicing the holy prayer practice of “Height Therapy.” Or maybe, more accurately, “Space Therapy.” I keep learning how to take up space in this world, unapologetically. If not for me, then for my girls.

Reflection & Expression

Find an image that defines beauty for you—try looking for something that is a nontraditional representation of beauty. In other words, don’t just look for the most perfect model in a magazine.

Write about why you chose that particular image.

For Your Brazen Board

Add your beauty-image.