Beloved

by Rachel Gardner

  There are no other Christians at her sixth form, so Anna is praying for opportunities to share her love for Jesus with her new friends, but also finding the courage to speak and live it out.

  Tarn is realizing that remaining silent about her ‘boyfriend’ attacking her is making other girls more likely to be hurt by him in the future, so she’s beginning to speak out.

  After a few years of being single, Alex is at last dating a Christian guy. Determined not to jump into the wrong decision, she’s inviting her close friends to help her seek God for this new relationship.

  Rebecca was diagnosed with cancer last year, and the intensive treatment made all her hair fall out. She uses social media to share through vlogs and blogs her story of despair and hope, knowing that her life is in God’s hands.

  Their bravery shines, doesn’t it? As women, we’re designed to be brave. So, whatever your story, and however your bravery looks, reach out and begin to discover that you’re braver than you think you are!

  Wonderland

  What are some of your vulnerabilities?

  How do your fears or anxieties hold you back?

  How do you respond to the idea that God invites you to be brave?

  What do your acts of bravery look like?

  When have you been encouraged or inspired by someone’s everyday bravery?

  My sanctuary

  ‘I’m loved, yet...’ is a recognition of your needs or inadequacies that hold you back. ‘I’m loved, so...’ is your chance to name your hopes for your life as you step into the wonderful and empowering love of God.

  I asked some young women to finish these sentences. Here’s what they wrote: pithy but powerful snapshots of what they’re discovering about being loved by God.

  I’m loved, yet I’m tempted and broken.

  I’m loved, so I’m learning to love others more than I love my addictions.

  (Tasha)

  I’m loved, yet I’ve been so anxious about everything.

  I’m loved, so I have nothing to fear.

  (Liz)

  I’m loved, yet I’m afraid.

  I’m loved, so I’m discovering courageousness.

  (Rachael)

  I’m loved, yet I don’t know how to love.

  I’m loved, so I believe that anything is possible.

  (Lizzie)

  I’m loved, yet I forget it so quickly.

  I’m loved, so I don’t have to run any more.

  (Susie)

  I’m loved, yet sometimes I don’t reflect the cost of that love.

  I’m loved, so I need not live in the shame of my past.

  (Micah)

  How will you finish both these sentences?

  I’m loved, yet...

  I’m loved, so...

  I love these words written by David over 3,000 years ago. Use them to focus your heart on Father God. He is your strength and shield. You can be brave because you can be sure that Almighty God fights for you and shelters you. We can be like this for others because we have experienced it for ourselves.

  Your mighty God is here with you now. Being in his presence is like finding a pool of sunlight streaming through a window. You can sit in the warmth of his presence. You can soak up the strength that comes from knowing you are loved by him. So why not find a bit of light and soak up the warm rays as you soak up God’s love?

  The LORD always keeps his promises;

  he is gracious in all he does.

  The LORD helps the fallen

  and lifts those bent beneath their loads.

  The eyes of all look to you in hope;

  you give them their food as they need it.

  When you open your hand,

  you satisfy the hunger and thirst of every living thing.

  The LORD is righteous in everything he does;

  he is filled with kindness.

  The LORD is close to all who call on him,

  yes, to all who call on him in truth.

  He grants the desires of those who fear him;

  he hears their cries for help and rescues them.

  (Psalm 145:13–19 NLT)

  It’s the pits

  Right now I have hairy legs.

  And armpits.

  I’m not wearing any make-up, and my eyebrows are threatening to take over my face. My nails are chipped, my roots are epic, and if someone came to the door right now, I would seriously consider shouting ‘not at home!’ instead of facing them in this state.

  OK, so I’m not naked (you’ll be pleased to hear), so said visitor would be unaware of the hairy legs and pits situation. But I would know, and on some deeper level, that knowledge makes me feel a little bit unfeminine.

  Why?

  Even as I’m writing this, I’m feeling guilty for being so shallow. Now I know that I’m more than the number of likes I get on a profile picture. I know that I’m loveable whether I’m toned, bloated, shaved, plucked, waxed or hairy. But I still inhabit a society that screams at me from every magazine cover, billboard poster and advert that female beauty equals young, slim and hair-free. I know it’s a beauty ideal that’s unrealistic and unkind, but I also know that unless my beauty is rooted in something deeper than how I’m looking on any given day, I will compare myself with poster-girl and find myself lacking.

  ‘Being beautiful takes a lot of hard work,’ Zara told me after I once commented on how gorgeous she always looked. ‘I have to go through all these rituals and things I do to make sure I look exactly right. I can’t just leave the house moments after getting up. Urgh. I’d look horrible. You wouldn’t recognize me.’

  Of course, I’d recognize her – I know that’s not what she meant. But there’s something really sad about a beautiful young woman not wanting to be seen by people (including those who love her), unless she meets an ideal she’s adopted from an industry that neither knows nor cares about her.

  It seems that being beautiful is a project that, whether we like it or not, every woman is signed up for from the moment we’re born. Living in a culture that places such a huge amount of importance on beauty increases our risk not only of not really liking ourselves, but also of envying and even disliking other women whose faces and bodies seem to fit. Social media provides countless ways to compare and judge others on their appearance alone. Anonymous, fast and image-driven, it’s the perfect vehicle for encouraging us to participate in cruelty towards ourselves and others. Somehow, if someone’s image is online, they’re fair game.

  The beauty project

  Women at war over their image is nothing new. Although the range of beauty products was pretty limited, the women of the past were nonetheless highly creative. Queen Cleopatra of Egypt (69 – 30BC) is recorded as having worn red lipstick made from finely crushed carmine beetles mixed with ants’ eggs. Women in Ancient Greece kept the bloom in their cheeks by painting on herbal pastes made from crushed berries and seeds.

  By the Middle Ages, wearing make-up was seen as a bit promiscuous, but Queen Elizabeth reclaimed the practice by popularizing the ‘natural’ look. This involved women at court plastering white lead paste called ceruse all over their faces (which made their hair fall out), and painting their cheeks and lips with red concoctions that permanently stained their skin.

  Nice.

  Although our understanding of the chemicals involved in cosmetics is superior today, we are possibly just as easily led by society’s ideas of beauty as were our ancient sisters. A recent study of English women revealed that when it came to emotional stability, social confidence, self-esteem and physical attractiveness, the women who wore make-up regularly scored lower in these four categories than those who never wore it at all. Wearing make-up seems to make us need to wear make-up.

  Making women look ‘beautiful’ has always been on the cards, but today it’s big business. From the cradle to the grave, we have to deal with the ugly truth that being who we are isn’t enough. In a world that is hugely critical about how women look, can we really blame the celebrities for giving in t
o a little nip and tuck to keep themselves in the public eye? Well, in a word, yes. Because the impossible standard of ascetic beauty that these women set soon becomes the benchmark that we are all expected to live up to.

  Fashion magazines regularly name and shame the latest celebrity to go under the knife, but who knows whether this is actually true? And that’s the other problem, isn’t it? Not only are we suspicious of our own bodies for doing what comes ‘naturally’ (like sprouting hair, sagging and wrinkling), but we are increasingly suspicious that other women are getting a little help to keep up the illusion of perfection. It seems today that if you can get some help to be the most perfect possible version of yourself, you do so, and you’re expected to do so too.

  It’s little wonder if you and I judge ourselves so harshly on what we see in the mirror.

  Raw

  It’s amazing just how many of us feel we fall short of the beauty ideal we have in our minds. Have you ever struggled to leave the house make-up free, or felt that a new outfit would not only boost your self-confidence but also your worth in other people’s eyes? You might even be someone who others look at and think, ‘She looks so confident; she wouldn’t ever be unhappy with how she looks.’

  But you are.

  And you’re not alone.

  I haven’t always had an easy relationship with my looks. In my late teens I felt uncomfortable with my body, and I spent a lot of my teenage years feeling inferior to other girls, often feeling like a stranger in my own body. If only I had the time, skill and money to ‘work on it’, things would be better; I would be happier and more confident. The older I got, the more I viewed my body as my project that I had to improve. Sometimes my triggers were being with those people who I thought were far more gorgeous than me. Other times, my triggers were being with people who thought I was beautiful! I had a lovely relative who would always comment on how nice I looked. I was flattered, and it was really kindly meant. But after a while I began to feel an incredible pressure to make sure that when I saw this relative, I looked the best I could. I was afraid that anything less would be letting her down!

  In her disarmingly honest blog, Lisa Hickey paints a painful picture of her self-confessed beauty addiction that is getting in the way of her really living.

  Here we go again, I think, as I impatiently wait for the hair straightener to warm up. I’ve washed my hair, deep conditioned it, shaved my legs, tweezed my eyebrows. I’ve blown dry my hair, but it’s still a wreck. It’s always a wreck. It’s thin, so thin that when I put it into a ponytail, a pencil is thicker. I plaster down the worst of the fly-aways with a hair product that promises something it can’t deliver.

  What I really want to be doing – instead of going through that same-same ritual – is learning to write code. Studying analytics. Talking with someone halfway round the world about real oppression. Not the kind of oppression that I feel because of my addiction to beauty.7

  Relentlessly pursuing a beauty ideal increases our vulnerability to inhabiting a heightened state of self-consciousness, self-doubt and self-criticism. When we worship the idol of beauty, we quickly embrace a very distorted and dissatisfied self-image. Even if many of us know that we will never achieve the beauty ideal for very long, we still seem to be prepared to pay the price financially and emotionally.

  Is this really God’s best for us – that our value is only derived from this small area of our lives?

  Is there a way out?

  If you find yourself caught in a cycle of trying to live up to a physical perfection you can never hope to achieve or sustain (because you’re a person, not a poster), then it’s time to break free and discover how to love the beauty you already are.

  But don’t panic! The answer isn’t throwing out your make-up bag or wearing clothes made out of felt! It lies in working out what beauty is, and what it isn’t. If the most beautiful you will ever be is the ‘you’ that God is moulding and shaping into the likeness of his Son, then chasing anything other than this will always disappoint. God created beauty. It’s his gift to his world.

  In fact, you don’t actually have to ‘do’ anything to be beautiful to God. He sees his Son Jesus in you if you believe in him. Nothing tops that!

  But maybe at the times when we think we’re chasing a beauty ideal, we’re actually pursuing something altogether different? Something that’s the very opposite of real beauty?

  Glamour gullible

  You and I operate in a society that has reduced beauty to glamour – and glamour is all about what happens on the surface of our skin. ‘This world of glamour caters for the surface and external reality. Once you’ve got the upfront hit from glamour, you usually find little or nothing behind it.’8

  If glamour is the blusher painted onto your face, beauty is the inner radiance that lights you up from the inside.

  If glamour is the outfit that helps you make an entrance, beauty is your generous heart that means your presence changes the atmosphere.

  If glamour is the perfume clinging to your clothes, beauty is the fragrance of your life that lingers long after you’ve left the room.

  God will always be more impressed with your desire for beauty than with your pursuit of glamour. His creativity pulsating through us inspires us to have fun with the glamour, but he calls us into the deeper, richer place of moulding an inner life of hidden beauty that will radiate through our whole being.

  In the Old Testament, the prophet Samuel knows that he needs to anoint the next king of Israel. His choices have been narrowed down to the sons from one particular family. God knows that although Samuel is a godly guy, he’s still a human being, and will probably be swayed by the ‘glamour’ he sees, not by the beauty he senses. So he focuses Samuel’s attention on the heart with these words: ‘GOD judges persons differently than humans do. Men and women look at the face; GOD looks into the heart’ (1 Samuel 16:7 MSG).

  Face lift

  This understanding of beauty doesn’t negate our need to accept and love our faces and bodies. It doesn’t prevent us from exploring different ways to express ourselves through fashion, or undermine our interest in having beauty products and regimes. But what it does do is continually remind us that faces lifted to Jesus will always radiate our true beauty beneath the glamour.

  So the right question for us as Christian women to ask ourselves isn’t: ‘Is it OK to love fashion and wear make-up?’, but ‘How can we be women who allow our beauty to change the world?’

  Wow!

  Of course your beauty can change things!

  Brave beauty

  Invariably, if you hear a talk at a Christian event about beauty and femininity, someone will mention Esther. And why not? She was beautiful and brave. A winning combination. But her story, although deeply powerful, can feel so far away from our daily experience as to make her seem like a fantasy.

  The reality is that in her society, she was considered as nothing. Being a woman, a foreigner and an orphan was not a winning combination. But her beauty made her stand out. And it propelled her into the bed and courts of a violent and powerful king who thought nothing of discarding his wife and queen (Vashti) who dared to speak up against the injustice of being paraded in front of a room full of noblemen.

  Esther’s beauty may have secured her the prize, but being chosen for your body, married to a cruel man and kept for sex is hardly a fairy-tale ending. But incredibly, just as the story darkens with the announcement of the plan to massacre the Jews, Esther steps into the limelight, bold and beautiful. She was beautiful in a brutal place. Hers isn’t a story of a cute girl winning a king’s heart at a pageant. Hers is a story of courage under fire in saving an ethnic group from annihilation. Although put on a pedestal for her beauty, she sought to be beautiful when it mattered most. And she could have been killed for it.

  Mordecai sent this reply to Esther: ‘Don’t think for a moment that because you’re in the palace you will escape when all other Jews are killed. If you keep quiet at a time like this, deliverance and r
elief for the Jews will arise from some other place, but you and your relatives will die. Who knows if perhaps you were made queen for just such a time as this?’

  Then Esther sent this reply to Mordecai: ‘Go and gather together all the Jews of Susa and fast for me. Do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. My maids and I will do the same. And then, though it is against the law, I will go in to see the king. If I must die, I must die.’ So Mordecai went away and did everything as Esther had ordered him.

  (Esther 4:13–17 NLT)

  What might Esther say to us today? I think she’d encourage us not to seek the beauty that puts us in the limelight, but to seek situations where we can act boldly and beautifully for the sake of others. She’d love this quote by Lupita Nyong’o: ‘What is fundamentally beautiful is compassion for yourself and those around you. That kind of beauty enflames the heart and enchants the soul.’9

  Over the years, realizing that I am God’s beloved daughter and heir has brought about a slow but significant shift in how I see and express myself. My ideas about what is beautiful in another person, even in myself, have changed. For so long I tried not to be vain and insecure about my appearance. What helped was putting down in writing my own personal rally cry to chase the beauty of a Jesus-shaped life rather than the glamour of a magazine-shaped self-image.

  My beauty manifesto

  I have come up with a list of eight things that I will believe or do, with the help of God, to live a beautiful life.

  I am human-being shaped, not magazine-shaped. So I will start with accepting the body I have, not the body I think I should have.

  Reflection: