Body image. Ouch. I spent a long time suffering under its tyrannical thumb. When I was a teenager, I didn’t quite have the self-discipline to be anorexic, but I was constantly on a diet, and constantly dissatisfied. Those years seem like a lifetime ago, but I still remember.

Squirming under the heavy weight of glossy photographs, I shifted in my waiting room chair. I had come to have my braces tightened, and I had picked up Seventeen. There, from the pages they stared up at me, with perfect make-up, and flawless skin, and curves, gorgeous curves in all the right places. I flipped through advice on back-to-school must-haves, and how to get sexy hair, and always they looked out at me, with heartless, silent laughter. The orthodontist’s assistant called my name, and I walked through the door, with a lump in my throat, believing I would never be good enough.

When we’re little girls, we want to be brides and mommies, queens of households. We get older and we want to be cherished, wanted, adored. And as we grow we get some idea of the type of girl who gets that much attention. We hope we’ll grow up to be beautiful, to have the sort of bodies that men are shopping for, that the magazines tell us are hot. And day by day, the blossom opens, until we stand in front of the mirror, all grown up, and many of us, especially those who have been steeped in the idealism of retouched images and skinny models, are crushed by what we see.

Some of the hopeful ones go on trying to follow the dictates of magazines and television, becoming increasingly immodest and plasticized as they compete with pixelated perfection for the attention they desire. The less hopeful just get depressed. And body image is tossed around as a buzzword for a secret feminine pain. We’re so liberated, but not really. In a large sense, women are still commodities, our worth defined by our bodies.

I want to share some of the things that have helped me start to get victory in this area, both to help anyone else who is struggling, and to help those of us who are moms know how to help our daughters understand themselves as women in this body-obsessed world.

Put yourself on a low-lie diet.
Certainly, women have coveted each other’s beauty for generations, but nowadays we have more provocation to covet than ever. Women today are surrounded by lies, the twisted half-truths of marketers hoping to profit from the feelings of inadequacy their lies create. They don’t care if you cry yourself to sleep over your imperfect skin as long as you shell out your money for Noxema or Oil of Olay. They don’t care if feeling outdated in the clothes God has provided for you makes you ungrateful and jealous of other women just as long as you send a little money their way for the latest issue of In Style. They don’t care if despair over not being as thin, or as busty, or as leggy as their cover girls leaves you borderline suicidal as long as you buy the new jeans in the ad on page nine. They want you to covet what you see in their pictures. They’re selling things, products and information, and the first rule of selling is that you have to create a need. That need is born in women’s natural desire to be desired and is fed by images of an unattainable standard. The marketing is designed to provoke you to covetousness, so that you’ll pay money to have a chance at measuring up. But you never will measure up because then you would stop needing their products and information.

Covetousness is a sin, a destructive poison that separates us from God. The first step in overcoming the demon of body image misery is refusing to listen to the lie that you need to look a certain way to be OK. Go on a media fast and detox. Turn the television off. Stop watching movies for a while. Quit reading the magazines that give you trouble. When I first realized how much the world’s impossible ideal was hurting me, I put a little Bible in my purse. In waiting rooms, I didn’t look at the magazines, I read the Bible instead. Even in the checklane at the supermarket, I refused to look at pictures that tempted me to covet what other women looked like. I pulled out my little Bible, and glued my eyes to it.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t do our best to look beautiful. We absolutely should! Looking neat and clean and put together is a good testimony, a delight to our husbands, and a big emotional boost to ourselves. I’m just saying that if we’re feeling bad about ourselves, it can really help to shut of the voices that are screaming at us about not looking good enough.

Worship the Lord.
Covetousness is idolatry (Colossians 3:5), and coveting other women’s appearances means that we’re worshiping a false god of beauty, thinking that if we only looked thinner, or curvier, or had better hair that somehow we’d be happier, that our lives would be better. But true happiness is only found in God. Our lives are best when they are poured out in service to Him. When we are worshiping the true God, we weaken the power that false gods hold over us. And when we’re delighting in the Lord, it’s a whole lot easier to see that the world’s offers of happiness are counterfeits.

Trust your husband to the Lord.
For a lot of women, the “voices” that scream the loudest are the eyes of men. These women want desperately to be married, but they don’t feel like the type of woman that turns heads. Or, maybe they are married, but their husbands are always looking at other women. (I also talked about this situation in this post.) The women in the media just serve to further convince these women of all the ways they aren’t good enough for the attention they long for. Let me be a little blunt, when men are staring at women, taking long looks and second looks, they are almost always doing it for that little floaty zing it makes them feel. And that is just old-fashioned lust. It’s looking at a woman for the purpose of feeling sexual feelings. The Bible talks about this here:

But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. –Matthew 5:28

And guess what? Any woman is powerless to hold onto a man who is in this state. Men who have given themselves over to lust are going to look at every pair of x chromosomes that walks by, hoping for a zing. We women often think that if we were just prettier, if we just dressed a little better, if we just lost a few more pounds and looked more like those girls on the magazine covers then we’d win the great beauty pageant of life and be crowned with a husband’s unswerving attention. It just isn’t so. Men in that state are like women in a shoe store. It doesn’t matter if they have the perfect pair of strappy sandals tucked under their arm, they’re still going to linger over the half-price pumps.

A godly husband is from the Lord, and that’s true whether you’re hoping to be married, or you are broken over a current difficult marriage. Faithful, honorable men happen, not when their women reach a pinnacle of beauty that satisfies them so much they are never tempted to look at anyone else, but when the Lord get a hold of a man’s heart and teaches him to say with Job,

I made a covenant with mine eyes; why then should I think upon a maid? –Job 31:1

Work on being adorned with good works.
Last of all, we should put our focus on what God thinks is beautiful, developing meek and quiet spirits (1 Peter 3:4), and being adorned with good works (1 Timothy 2:10). If you’re not married, this will greatly increase your chances of attracting a quality man, instead of a lust muffin anyway, and if you are married your husband will be blessed. Best of all, you’ll feel much more beautiful because you’ll be pleasing the Lord instead of obsessing over how you don’t measure up to the vanity of the world.

Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the LORD, she shall be praised. –Proverbs 31:30

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 9:36 am and is filed under Loving Our Children, Modesty (to be discreet, chaste). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.