Being part of an all girl team isn’t stifling my femininity at all; in fact, if anything, it’s calling it out more. Beyond even that, it’s causing me to seek Abba’s heart for me as a woman.
I’m hungering to know what femininity is. What is God’s heart for me as a woman? What does it mean to be really beautiful, truly lovely, absolutely captivating? I know it’s more than just skin and the clothes I put on every morning, but wouldn’t it be naiive to believe that that isn’t at least part of it?
I’ve joked that this month I’m reoutfitting myself. My “closet”—two stuff sacks—now have a few new pretty things that resemble what I’d wear back in the states. That’s a HUGE praise. I look more like my U.S. self in the physical sense. That’s also a huge praise.
But that’s the crux of it, I think. I don’t want this beauty thing to stop at a few new dresses and a sample bottle of Ralph Lauren Romance. This look, as familiar as it is, doesn’t define what it means to be beautiful. So what does?
Gai’s confidence in my beauty stuck with me. She had no qualms in looking at me and calling me into beauty. Her confidence made me pause, made me listen. The LORD has been doing the same thing. I asked him to show me my beauty and He whispered to me,
“Do you see that flower? You are lovelier than even that.”
When that happened, I stopped in my tracks and cried. This God I love so much doesn’t just want to be my Abba Daddy. He wants to be my Lover. He calls me his Beautiful Beloved.
At the bottom of it, that’s what I’m starting to walk into: not my own confidence in my beauty, but the confidence that He sees me as beautiful and that THAT makes me a Beauty. The kind of femininity that He’s given me is one of a dual nature: loving to play dress up and also to play in the mud. It’s a unique beauty, one that He didn’t give to anyone else. My story is beautifully broken and beautifully redeemed, and my heart is a beautiful patchwork quilt of dreams and scars and a future and a hope.
I am beautiful because He calls me Beautiful.
“You are altogether beautiful, my darling, beautiful in every way.” Song of Songs 4:7
