Beautiful?

If you step outside your house or turn on your TV, you know what the media thinks about how we should look. I think the danger of this is how we let that mindset slip into our faith and our interactions with self-esteem. We take cues from the world around us instead of looking straight to the One who created our bodies as they are. Whenever anyone talks about body image, there’s almost always something said like “you are beautiful, no matter what anyone says.”  Like many young women, I struggle with loving the body my soul was put in. I see all the little things that I’d like to change. I try to change them as best I can, even to the point of hurting the body God entrusted my soul with. I’ve heard from many Christians that my body is a temple and ought to be treated as so. Somewhere along the line, I think I took that metaphor too far. I wanted to be a shining temple, a beautiful temple, worthy of God’s presence. That’s a huge task, of course, and one that seemed unattainable. Whenever I mentioned feeling un-beautiful, my friends would jump on the opportunity to affirm my beauty, both inner and outer. This is a common and not a terrible response, but in those moments of vulnerability and hurt, why is our reaction to affirm the place where we are hurting most? We don’t take the opportunity to shift the focus from appearance to our value and identity as a child of the King. Any further comment on my appearance only validates my thinking that I am only worthy if I am beautiful. The problem isn’t that I think I’m ugly; the problem is that thinking of myself as ugly is detrimental to my value as a human being, as a child of God. I’m not asking if my appearance is desirable or not, rather I’m asking where my value lies. In 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, our bodies are said to be a temple where the Holy Spirit dwells. It says that our bodies are not our own, that we were bought with a price. The thing I overlooked within this passage is that it’s really not about the temple at all. It’s about what the temple has in it. The reason the temple is valuable and precious is because God himself bought it and now lives in it. That is what makes the temple anything more than ordinary. And that is what we should be affirming in people when they are hurting, because they have bought into the lie that if we don’t look a certain way, we are less-than.I’m not saying we should never compliment anyone, because I think it’s never a bad idea to speak kindness to another person. I am saying that we should stop including that into the core of our value. I’m also not saying it’s a bad thing to want to look good, or dress up, because they are temples, go ahead and decorate them! It’s when that desire to dress up the temple becomes the only reason we like the temple. What if, when someone said that they don’t like the way they look, we took the opportunity to point back to the real reason we have any value at all. What if, in that moment of deep hurt from what the world has hammered relentlessly into our young brains, we chose to ignore what was said about appearance and remind each other that our value is not in our looks, but rather in the gift we carry as followers of Christ. What if we focused on how we can love more deeply, instead of trying to convince each other that we fit some confusing standard of “beauty” this world has set for us? I think therein lies the only way to truly fight against all the damage this world has done to our collective evaluation of our worth. As long as we are looking at each other’s bodies and trying to fix how we look at them, we are never going to get anywhere. We can only be whole when our identity is completely wrapped up in our relationship with the One who created the whole universe, including our imperfect bodies. You are precious, not because of how beautiful you are, but because you carry the most precious gift this world has to offer.words by Breanna Maier and photo by Leah Van Otterloo