Let me preface this blog post by saying that I am not a girly girl.
I rarely wear make-up, I don’t own an eyelash curler and I didn’t start waxing my eyebrows until I was 21 years old.
But in the 8 months I’ve been on the race, I have found nail polish, of all things, to be a tool that brings the Kingdom.
In Thailand we worked with Lighthouse in Action (LIA) which is an organization ferociously working to push back the darkness of the sex industry and bring Light to Chiang Mai. LIA goes into bars to build relationships with the women there who sell their bodies as well as the men who buy them. At the end of the month, our squad threw a party for the women with whom we’d been building relationships. We had games and food and overall merriment prepared for these women to experience love in a way they never had before. One of the stations we had set up was a mani/pedi station.
Upon entering Thailand we learned that in Thai culture, feet are considered disgusting and are offensive to many people. You are never to point at things or people with your feet, much less touch someone else’s feet. But touch them we did. We rubbed their feet and painted their toes and made something deplorable by the world’s standards something to be marveled at – much like the Lord does with us.
In Malawi, our team was working with an organization that dug water wells. While the men helped out with that process, the women of the team were ushered to a patch of shade day after day to sit and talk with the women of the village. We shared about Jesus and what He was doing in our lives and in theirs. We talked of marriage and cooking techniques, and the faithfulness of God. We asked the younger girls what they wanted to be when they grew up. We talked about the Gospel. One day a girl on the team decided she was going to bring her nail polish with her to the village. As we talked with the women once again, we started painting their fingernails. The ooh-ed and ahhh-ed over the bright pink polish that had been spread over their calloused fingers that were usually used to chop fire wood or remove boiling pots of Nsima from a fire. Their painted nails were a physical representation of the truth that we had been sharing with one another throughout the week – that they were daughters of the King. That they were beautiful and worthy of love. Simply painting their fingernails helped the Gospel come alive to these women.
Something as trivial as painted fingernails has served as a reminder to women all over the world that they are who God says they are. We are significant (Eph. 2:10), we are accepted (Rom 15:17) and we are complete (Col 2:10). What is it going to take for you to believe that these things are true about you too?
