I stood in the bathroom of the fanciest hotel I’ve ever seen and got re-acquainted with my body.
The bathroom had full-length mirrors which showed forty different angles of me with the fur of my head, and the kind of lighting you pray for in dressing rooms. As usual in full-length mirror situations, I looked critically from head to toe and immediately pointed out a list of flaws, from my legs, which hadn’t been shaved in way too long, to my shoulders, which have always been too wide to be cute in halter-top bathings suits like the one I was wearing. The usual insecurity that overtakes me in even the best-lit dressing rooms hooked its chin over my shoulder and grinned like an old lover.
But as I used a couple squirts of the hotel’s fancy lotion, I watched my hands in the mirror. And I felt a nudge- look at these. Really look.
My hands are my favorite feature. They have my maternal grandpa’s big palms and my paternal grandma’s long fingers. Usually they have dirt under their unpainted fingernails, and there are twin callouses on the palms under my pinkies and the sides of my thumbs from years of batting practice. They can hold pens and babies and, occasionally, grudges.
My hands are beautiful without any adornment. I love them because they are, and are mine.
//
This month in Zambia, I woke up every day and got dressed without a mirror, washed my face and brushed my teeth without running water or even a bathroom- just a mud trough behind the outhouse where we spit our toothpaste. I have only seen mirrors on our trips into town for wifi, and every time I feel a shock- so that’s me. So that’s what I look like.
Every day this month, I’ve sat in a circle on bamboo mats with five other girls and listened to them give feedback. They spoke truth about me and each other- not the kind of “truth-speaking” that veils resentment or malice, but truth-speaking about who we are in the Lord.
Every day, my teammates told me I am loyal and brave, kind and smart, wise and strong. One told me she saw me as a “holy rebel,” unafraid of social convention when it came to doing what was right, and the words brought tears to my eyes.
Beauty didn’t enter the feedback sessions, but they told me I was beautiful too— as I put my hair up in a bun for the fourteenth day straight, as I tried on bright chatangi skirts our host made for us, as I walked through the mall feeling smelly and oddly dressed.
With this identity spoken over me every day, it’s no wonder I needed to get to know my body all over again. Since I was 11, I’ve been told I am too tall, too fat, too athletic, too unfeminine to be pretty. I’ve stood in front of countless bathroom mirrors, listing my flaws under excellent lighting.
And the whole time the Lord was right there, nudging me to remember the ways he made me that are so good- so much more than beautiful.
Trying to remind me that God loves me simply because I am, and I am his.
And what if I lived like that? What if I lived every day like I believed that the Lord loved me the way I believe God loves everyone, not in an abstract, big-picture sense but in particular? How would I be different if I believed God saw my calloused hands and broad shoulders and round hips and said, it is good? If all of me- my opinions and loud laugh and six-foot-tall body- honored the Lord because he said that it is so?
I wouldn’t be afraid anymore.
I would put my hands on my stomach in the bathroom mirror and rejoice at the way my diaphragm expands and contracts with every breath. I would belly laugh no matter what I was wearing and run in public without worrying that people were looking. I would live straight-backed and broad-shouldered and free.
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This month the Lord made me watch my hands and listen to my teammates in order to love myself again. In a hotel bathroom, in Nike shorts and an old bathing suit, the Lord made me look up from my flaws and lock eyes with my insecurity instead, to fight another battle in a war waged since someone first looked at me and found me lacking.
I am smart, strong, kind, brave, loyal, a holy rebel. Beautiful. These are things I know to be true.
It took a month without mirrors, a month of sweaty days and cold showers and belly laughter and one well-lit bathroom for the lesson to stick: this is the identity the Lord gave me. This is who I am. And beautiful is too small a word for all the things the Lord made me to be.
