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