Trying to find beautiful

I have a complicated relationship with the word beautiful.

The first time I remember telling myself I was fat was in junior high.

I’d like to think it had to do with a changing body and hormones, but I don’t think that was it.

There is something about being suddenly aware of boys that throws a girl into new beliefs about herself. I’d like that not to be true – and it may not be an issue for some of you out there – but for many of us that’s just the way it is, and we need to be honest about our internal dialogue. I’ve also found that this isn’t a female issue. Body image - trying to believe the best about these vessels we’ve been given to walk around in and make a life with - it’s complicated for most everyone.

From a very early age, our beauty is tied up in the relationships around us. And our vantage point of ourselves is tied up in our experiences, our memories, and the many messages from the world around us.

We are each trying to find beautiful.

In high school, I remember exercising for beauty, rather than health or strength for the first time. Maybe if I did just the right amount of sit ups I would feel better. I remember healthily and not healthily saying no to chips and Snickers bars and pop, because maybe then I’d be pretty and my hips would stop making pants so dang difficult.

I thought with marriage my body image issues would be better. With a husband to tell me I’m beautiful, what can go wrong? But my discomfort with myself didn’t go away no matter how many times my husband told me I was beautiful in his eyes, because I couldn’t see it with my own eyes.

The word beautiful was always playing games in my head, taunting me with something I’d never be:

I’m not girly.

I’m not graceful.

I’m not good with my hair.

I like food a lot.

Then, one day I turned to my left and saw my daughter. I heard the words taunting me coming from her mouth. Something had to give. I pleaded with God to help me. God’s answer, as it is so often, was the Word of God. He picked me up, dusted off my shame, and sent me to the Scriptures. It wasn’t a quick Bible verse or a meme, but rather a walk through a book I had really never given much thought to before.

First I studied, and then I wrote, through the Song of Songs, I began to see that beauty is not male or female. It’s less about my hair than I think, less about the amount of tone in my muscles. It is about my body, but it’s also about my life and my relationships and my God and how I feel like I “fit” or don’t fit with those things. It has a lot less to do with pretty and a lot more to do with strength than we like to think.

Beauty has a lot to do with a Savior. It’s more intimately connected to our understanding that we are savable, lovable. It’s about Jesus’s sacrifice and death, which doesn’t sound very beautiful or connected to how I see my body, but it is. It has to do with things like honor and kindness, even when it holds onto its very physical properties.

And, again, it’s always relational.

If we want to love our bodies, or even make peace with them - these complicated containers that help us weep in our sadness and dance in our joy, or just talk, and sit, and pray - we need to get cozy with at least one relationship: God. It’s time to ask the challenging question of what beautiful means, for our bodies and for our lives.

God makes beautiful and God defines beautiful, I don’t get to. I want to believe Him instead, be covered by Him instead of my own ideas about my body and myself and this one word – beautiful,

but we can only do that together.

Healing our beliefs about the word beautiful will be changed in the Word, yes, but God is teaching me that it is also changed in community with each other – in friendship, in life together, in calling out beautiful where we see it, and in proclaiming God’s workmanship in one another – not just to our daughters, but to one another’s daughters, to wives, to husbands, to neighbors, to friends, to one another everywhere.

The battle for beautiful wasn’t meant to be lonely.

Dig out your phone. Text a friend. Tell them they are beautiful. Sing it over them. They need you and in the midst of that, God will heal this weirdness about beauty and beautiful and boys and all of it.

Altogether Beautiful, friends.

Let’s help each other begin to believe it.