This thought has been rolling around in
my head all week, this idea of the perfect. Is it that continually
trying to be perfect is an enemy of the good in life.
(This idea is thought to come from a poem byVoltaire.)
It is now mid January and since
Thanksgiving I gained enough weight so that some of my pants that fit
in November are now not comfortable.
What will I do next? It feels like I am
facing a testing and a battle to find normal, yet again. In the past
I would either: buy larger clothes, or, try an extreme diet. However,
I made some commitments when I decided to find normal for myself.
I made promises to myself that I would:
#1. Not do crazy diets, just
short-term, healthy ones.
#2. Make it a life goal to discover how
to eat daily in a way that helps me to maintain a normal weight
without continual ups and downs.
#3. Accept myself as I am (no
trash-talking to self).
#4. Not spend much mental or emotional
energy on food obsessing. (This means not focusing too much time or
thought on feasting or dieting, but instead I will focus on living).
Thoughts for the battle: We are all
made differently and we each have our own type and style of beauty. I
went to an exercise session at a local pool and I was changing in a
locker room surrounded by naked middle-aged and older women. I have
been married to a man for many years and was not ogling at women's
bodies, but I couldn't help thinking as I was changing clothes, that
women are.... pretty. Their various womanly curves are beautiful. We
were beautiful. The women around me were curvy and dimpled, yet
strong and lovely.
Now, if I can see the beauty when I
look at a group of tall, thin, short, round, flat, fat women, WHY
can't I see beauty in myself?
I think it is harder now than ever to
see ourselves as lovely women because our eyes and minds are full of
unending media exposure. In magazines and on the TV, we see many
super-models every day. Society's visual change began many years ago;
C.S. Lewis commented in Screwtape Letters that “we
now teach men to like women whose bodies are scarcely distinguishable
from those of boys. Since this is a kind of beauty even more
transitory than most, we thus aggravate the female’s
chronic horror of growing old...It is all a fake, of course; the
figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in
bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to
make them appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature
allows a full-grown woman to be.”
And now add photoshop!
We all want to be attractive. Today,
the media defines beautiful as super skinny and we see so many
images, we accept this false normal. In addition, we find that
fleeting look impossible to achieve. This can cause us to give up on
trying to be healthy and beautiful in our own selves and with our own
inherited shape. We should rebel! We are not un-beautiful, we were
just born in the WRONG CENTURY to be in style!
So, in support of accepting that women
come in all kinds of beautiful shapes and sizes, I will, Accept
myself as beautiful
right now. I will stop
spending another minute being sorry for who I
am
NOT.
That mindset
is the enemy of joy and a waste of valuable emotional energy that
should be used for living and loving.
You and I are
lovely and beloved.
Isaiah 40:11 He
tends his flock like a shepherd. He gathers the lambs in his arms and
carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have
young.
Isaiah 43:1b Fear
not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are
mine.
1 John 3:1 How
great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be
called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world
does not know us is that it did not know Him.
Well said!
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