My [Body Image] Testimony

Last week, I went to the regular meeting space of the WISex focus group. WISex stands for Women's Identity and Sexuality, and it is a place for women to learn from God and one another as they share their stories and read Scripture. The leaders of this space asked me to give a testimony about how God has transformed my attitudes toward the body he's given me. I decided to share about my junior year in college.

 September 2008

At the start of the year, I was very excited to be studying abroad in Madrid, Spain. I remember shopping for clothes and picturing myself in those clothes having a great time in Spain--almost like a magazine catalogue of me enjoying my life as a study-abroad student. (See above picture, where I am totally faking having a good time.) When I actually got there, however, I found that making friends was more difficult than I had anticipated because I didn't connect with anyone on a deep level. For the first six weeks of the ten week quarter, I spent much of my time feeling vaguely unwelcome among the students in my program and trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. Eventually, I began to click with people from a local church; I felt included in the group and shed a lot of the anxiety and sadness I'd been carrying. I felt that God had seen me and heard me in my times of prayer, and he had provided a community that demonstrated how fitting in was less important than trusting Him, which is always my deepest need.

Friends in Spain!

Then I came back to campus in the winter and decided to join an InterVarsity biblestudy as an act of faith--I had felt like an outsider in InterVarsity earlier on, but I knew that it was important to be part of a spiritual community and that it involved a choice on my part. As I was reconnecting with InterVarsity folks I'd known from the years before, I found that one guy seemed interested in me in particular--he'd make sure to come over and say hello when we were at fellowship events, and he would send me instant messages over gmail fairly often. I was flattered and excited because he was someone I had admired from afar. We started going out on dates, but the excitement turned into confusion and dread when I realized he wasn't sure how he felt about me. When I realized I liked him more than he liked me, I kept trying to adjust my expectations and responses to fit his actions. Eventually, I realized that these interactions had disempowered me and tempted me to try to become someone who would be more attractive (physically, intellectually, and spiritually) to him. Because that was unhealthy for both of us, we decided to stop dating.

I was sad, I felt lonely again, and though I knew it wasn't my fault, I still felt like I had been rejected because I wasn't good enough. Specifically, I felt that I had not been pretty enough to keep his attention. And that felt awful.

The last InterVarsity event of the year was a camp called Summer Conference. At this conference, I found that even though God had taught me to trust him in Spain, I was having a hard time in California believing that he meets my deepest needs, especially those of relational closeness. I saw this struggle to trust God play out in the way that I obsessed over what clothes to wear each morning at the camp, how I spent extra time in the bathroom trying to make myself look cuter by combing my hair or putting it up, and the way I wanted people to compliment me, especially on my appearance.

This realization crystalized one night in biblestudy when we were looking at the woman with the alabaster jar of perfume in Mark. She spends a fortune on Jesus by breaking this jar and anointing him with this perfume, and she does so with complete abandon, heedless of the negative attention she is receiving from the all-male audience. She knows that she is doing what she can to love the one who saw her as a person with spiritual value and identity, not as an object, and she is expressing the depth of her appreciation for him. Jesus receives this praise from her as a beautiful thing and critiques the critics who try to put a price tag on this gesture of love.

I realized that I wanted to know Jesus as the one who loves and respects me, and I knew that there were things I was giving my energy and time to that kept me from being able to boldly declare Jesus' worth. I knew that my anxiety about my appearance had to do with trying to earn love from others, especially their attention and appreciation, and yet I had just seen that others' appreciation is a fickle thing in my brief dating relationship. I knew God was inviting me to lay aside my investment in others' opinions of me in order to experience his unchanging love, and I decided I would enact this belief by cutting my shoulder-length hair very, very short. I wanted it so short that I could no longer try to manipulate it into making me look good. This is what it looked like.

Shortest (and most transformational) haircut of my life.

This external change helped me step into God's unchanging appreciation of me, his daughter, the one whom he created with beauty. I felt free to appreciate so many aspects of my own body that I had taken for granted. I saw beauty in everything from how my fingers move to how my skin feels when the sun shines on it. And this beauty was not about me being better than others, nor was it really about me--it was a way for me to celebrate what God had already done by making me. I continue to learn this lesson in different seasons because it is always a struggle to trust that I am enough when I feel unattractive or unintelligent. But God has shown me that some burdens are not mine to carry, and he is faithful to point out when I have taken them up again (out of habit, or perhaps stress), and to remind me to tell my story so that others can be reminded where their beauty comes from.


PSA: What is body image?

Body image is how you see yourself when you look in the mirror or when you picture yourself in your mind. It encompasses:

• What you believe about your own appearance (including your memories, assumptions, and generalizations).
• How you feel about your body, including your height, shape, and weight.
• How you sense and control your body as you move.  How you feel in your body, not just about your body. 
• source: https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/what-body-image

How does our community see and respond to needs?

I gave a talk at Encounter (our weekly fellowship gathering) this semester! My topic? Cross-cultural relationships. This was the third installment of our four-part series "Connected: Designed for Right Relationships" in which we explored our relationship with God, with family, across cultures, and across gender. 

The text I'm speaking from is Acts 6:1-7, but I do a lot of introduction about InterVarsity, Cal, and the first five chapters of Acts, so if you aren't interested in the thrilling recap, start at 9:32 in the video*. It's actually not a video of me, but it has the audio paired with the slides I used, and it's 45 minutes in total. So if you have that kind of time, feel free to lend me your ear as I explain how cross-cultural relationships have deepened my need for and relationship with God.

*If you do start from the beginning, know that the recording starts midway through a description I'm giving about getting lost on the way to Encounter as a first year staff.

A Deeper Understanding of Pain, and Calling.

At UC Berkeley, I serve students who, consciously or not, carry a tremendous amount of unresolved hurt around inside of them. It goes deeper than I can see or even imagine, even when they begin to open up and voice the pain that is a constant companion on their undergraduate journey. Usually, students don't acknowledge this companion until it becomes impossible to ignore. That's mostly because seeking healing feels more threatening than tolerating the dull ache of the wound. We've gotten used to the feeling and convinced ourselves that ignoring pain is the best way to manage it, especially if we believe we are powerless to make a change.

CCF's recent dialogue spaces about sexual violence and assault have shown us otherwise. 

As the moderator of a recent Veritas Forum event said, "Injustice finds no solace in denial." In other words, the most disturbing and awful realities of our world are the ones that most need to be acknowledged, mourned, addressed communally (often sacrificially), and then remembered. This is not a popular nor comfortable sentiment--it wasn't in Jesus' day, and it sure isn't any more welcome today. Most civilians are not given tools to do anything other than witness violence (news reports, movies, shows, and games), and if we do take action, we usually intensify the problem by escalating the violence.

It starts with acknowledging that pain is everywhere, in everyone. 

At the first dialogue, four female leaders invited the men from our fellowship to hear their personal stories of objectification, harassment, and sexual assault. These experiences spanned the spectrum of sexual violence: 

- An anonymous online predator, pretending to be a friend of a friend, making requests over video chat that initially seemed innocent but escalated to indecent

- Being groped on a subway train

- Unwanted, invasive grasping on the dance floor

- Physical attack by a classmate on campus at night; raped in his apartment

Though these stories differ in their particulars, the overwhelming reality is that regardless of the intensity of the event, the feelings of being used/discarded, anger at and fear of men, the desire to disassociate from one's body, and the shame/humiliation of the experience were always present.

The men who were present at this space had time in a separate, male-only space to lament the pain of their sisters as well as acknowledge before God their complicity in the objectification of women's bodies through the use of pornography and participation in a culture that defines women by their sex appeal. Later, they had the opportunity to write anonymous messages to their sisters in the fellowship, who they knew were gathering next week to share in a female-only space. Here are a few of their reflections:

Dear sisters of CCF,

First off on behalf of men including myself, I am sorry for that I have been ignorant and have mistreated the person that God has uniquely made. You are a treasure and you are so valuable. I am so grateful and I am honored to be able to hear these stories. Please pray for us/me as men that we would continue to pursue this space for you and we would listen and respond in a loving manner.

Your story deserves to be heard. You are hugely important to us, in ways that are difficult to describe in words. Please don’t hold back for the sake of others, share for yourself.

Sisters of CCF, we love you! We invite you to help us be better brothers for you.

We love you. You all have been so beautifully made in the image of God. I apologize for ways I or my borthers may have hurt you and repent for ways we may have been complicit.

You are all wonderful sisters to us, and it is an honor to be your brothers.

In reading these messages, I can't help but feel the joy of the Lord strengthening my resolve to keep pursuing community-wide healing. That means everyone--perpetrators, victims, by-standers, enablers, cowards, heroes, etc.--provided they are able and willing to own their God-given role.

I've been learning this year that 

uncovering calling 

is 

paying enough attention 

to my experiences, reactions, and even pain 

in order to be able to identify and pursue 

the work God gives me to do.

And that work truly is a gift to me and to the world.

Moses and God Have a DTR, and Students Get Prayer

First of all, for those unfamiliar with the acronym DTR, it stands for Define The Relationship. If you want a musical explanation for this cultural phenomenon of clarifying an ambiguous relationship (particularly as it takes place in the contemporary church), watch this video.

Onto the meat of our subject, 

Moses and God Have a DTR in Exodus 3. 

Our community recently investigated this dynamic interaction during our second Encounter meeting. Michael Kim-Eubanks (pictured below) invited us to see how God is both familiar to Moses ("I am the God of your ancestors") and foreign/other to him ("Take off your shoes, for the place you are standing is holy ground"). And as a result of God initiating with Moses via a curiously behaving shrubbery, their relationship is never the same again.

Me, Michael, and Matt:

Hopefully at least one of us is familiar to you.

I found this duality--God is both known/unknown--very helpful in interpreting where I find myself and Cal Christian Fellowship as the semester begins. In many ways, ministry looks much as it did last semester: I'm supervising the same focus group leaders, we are running similar weekly gatherings, and I continue to invest in these spaces. On the other hand, ministry feels very different than it did last semester (and last academic year):

1. We have a surprising number of new people coming to BOTH Encounter and our focus groups.

2. We had a dance-off at Encounter, and people got so into it that we had seven rounds of going around the room doing a different dance move each time. (THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN IN CCF. EVER.)

3. Students are honest about their vulnerabilities with other students and staff; they admit their difficult feelings and are taking active steps to resolve them (counseling, conflict mediation, etc.).

I think I need to repeat that last one. Students are being honest about their vulnerabilities and seeking help. At a large, competitive public university where self-sufficiency is an art form and confidence is a survival tactic.

So that's different. Kind of shocking, and kind of cool ... kind of like a burning bush!

God wanted to define his relationship with Moses based on what had been (he knew Moses' life story, including the murder he committed that caused him to flee his homeland) as well as what would be (he had a plan that required Moses to believe some new things--including that he was God's chosen leader). It seems that God wants to define his relationship with me and with the CCF community on similar terms: he knows how hard it has been with the transitions our community has been through, including staff transitions. At the same time, God is asking us to respond in faith to the signs of new life he is stirring--new people and new levels of trust. 

Moses responds with curiosity, attention, and humility. I can say I'm curious and interested in attending to the new things God is doing. I am praying for the humility to respond well to surprises, the good as well as the less straightforwardly pleasant.