Please Excuse My Mustache

I have a mustache.

I noticed it when I looked in the mirror recently. Looking at my reflection is a rare occurrence these days. I usually try to avoid it because I’d rather live in ignorance. My clothes are wrinkled and I’ve most likely been wearing the same outfit for days. My hair is often greasy and frizzy and pulled back into a volume-less bun thingy. My face is a combination of sunburn and red from running up and down the stairs to our room and the other parts of the house. And regardless of the temperature, my skin is always greasy.
 
Yessiree, just stick a crown on my head and call me Miss America.

I suppose I could do something about this mustache. I would if I were in the US. Probably. Unless I felt like being lazy. But here I just sort of forget, because I’m busy and my mirror times are so few and far between that it’s easy to let it fall through the cracks.

And I’m not sure if this is a bad thing or a good thing, or some crazy combination of both.

This month has given me rest physically, but the mental battle is more than making up for it. It started when my food issues found an open door, snuck in, and set up shop. They bought Park Place and Boardwalk and started constructing hotels before I even had a chance to pass Go.

And as food issues usually do, it opened up doors to all sorts of other issues…namely messed up definitions of beauty. And this can easily happen when the kids call you fat two days in a row. “Jenifer sister, your big belly! Jenifer sister, this sister is skinny, and you are fat!� Obviously these aren’t the primary things that are bothering me this month, because they’re just kids and they don’t always get what they’re saying. Kind of like the time my grandmother in the nursing home asked me if I was pregnant.

What’s ironic is that I’m trying to prepare a week of Bible study lessons for the girls here about real beauty. About value. About seeing themselves the way God sees them. I have spent a good chunk of my free time researching verses and lessons about true beauty. At this very moment I have several tabs open on my computer, each presenting a Biblical view of inner beauty. Of finding your beauty in Christ.

And yet, even though I’ve read these verses over and over during the last couple of weeks and certainly during the course of my life, getting my mind to actually believe them, to accept them as the only truth, to put them as default, as a preset on my mental radio, is extremely difficult.

Maybe it’s because this perfect inner beautified woman drives me a little nuts. She’s all gentle and quite (1^st Peter 3:4), and homegirl probably never sleeps because she’s all busy making clothes and buying fields and whatnot (Proverbs 31). Let’s face it, at times her kind of beauty seems just as unattainable as the type of beauty worn by that airbrushed model on the cover of a magazine. 

Look, I’d love to end this blog right here with a nice little “I’m pushing the world’s view of beauty aside and finding my identity in Christ!!!� type quote. But the truth is, I’m still working this out. I’m a big approval addict, not just in this area, but in pretty much every part of my life.

Starting towards the end of India God began to make it clear that I need to be okay if He is the only one who finds me beautiful, if He is the only one who ever pursues me.

Woah.

And it’s my own fault. At training camp, on probably the very first night during worship, one of the staff people came up to me and asked me, “What do you want from God?�

Good grief. What kind of a question is that? I had never thought of this exact question, but since I was about to leave for a mission trip I definitely needed something super spiritual to say. Otherwise they might kick me out for not being Christian enough. So I told her “I want to find my identity in Christ, and not in what other people think of me.�

It did the job of answering her question, but the problem is it was also kind of true. And I tend to forget that God doesn’t always just hand you this stuff on a silver platter, but instead says, “Hey, let’s go on a journey together to find this thing.�

So here I am in Nepal, fighting.

This thing of finding your identity in Christ is a whole lot more difficult than it sounds. What if God really is the only one to ever call me beautiful? What if God is the only one who reads anything I write ever again? What if I never get to speak in front of a crowd again but instead all my messages are heard by God alone? Will I be okay? I’m working on it. Because unless I am okay with these things I will never be truly complete, truly content.

I can sing worship song after worship song that proclaims, “God, You are my everything!� But I might be lying a little bit. Because as much as I would like Him to be, right now I’m behaving like He isn’t.

Every time I run to food when I’m stressed/ tired/ bored/ happy/ homesick/ etc, etc, etc , I am saying, “God, You are not enough in this moment.�

Every time I obsess about my work and try to make it perfect so that people will think well of me I am saying, “God, Your view of me is not enough in this moment.�

And every time I accidentally catch a glimpse of myself in that mirror and frown a bit, I am saying “Creator of the mountains, the sunset, and so many beautiful things, Creator who knit me together, who doesn’t make mistakes, who has a plan, what You say about me in this moment is not only not enough, but maybe also not correct.�

Gross, Jenifer, gross.

Good old Romans 8 says “The mind of a sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace� (Verse 6)

Sometimes my mind feels like death.

Another translation says :
“For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.�
 
So I guess I have two choices here: death, or life and peace.
 
This is what I am working on this month. Setting my mind on the One who says all the hairs of my head are numbered. Including mustache hairs.  

I have to remember that the One who made this: 

Also made this: