reflection

The morning after an event, a friend sends a group picture.

Phone ding, watch buzz, and here I am in the crisp birth of morning, opened to God like a newborn settling in for sustenance.

I sit in the quiet beauty, eyes closed, hands empty, soul wholly-gulping the intimate holy.  This oneness I know to be the only quenching, the only sustaining satisfaction; this, the only restoration, the only breath, the only beginning.  I know this not in just in the way I know the events on my calendar or the way I remember the happenings of my life, but in the way that I know my husband.

Even so. Even so, I open my focused eyes to look at my phone, and my first mistake, to invite distraction, to blur the clarity of seeing, leads to the second.

I have some very bad habits when it comes to pictures of myself.

Even though I should, especially when looking at group pictures, focus on the people with me —how I love them; how grateful I am for them, to have experienced something with them; how beautiful God has made them to be, I experience an immediate temptation instead to zoom in to see how terrible I look.  In all honesty, I expect, even before I scrutinize a photo, not to like it on the basis of my own appearance.

The childish, self-consumed self thunders through my consciousness, demanding attention.

Me.  Look at me.

Never mind that in the very moment I turn my eyes to scrutinize my own appearance, I have turned my face away from Christ.

Fix your eyes upon Jesus, the author of the book of Hebrews wrote, and that verb they used means to focus on something in exclusion of everything and everyone else, including myself.   He’s the Way to seeing clearly, and so, the Holy Spirit keeps inviting me, gently, persistently, to gaze upon Christ, trusting God to watch over me.

Find the truest reflection of your identity in the loving gaze of your Father.  This I had just received, had only just begun to slip into, when the notification came through.

I close my eyes before I look at the photo, determined to be practical about my freedom. Self-deprecation not only destroys me from the inside, not only interrupts and captures my attention, but also minimizes the magnificence of God’s creativity. And God has said, do not call bad what I have called good, what I have described as wonderful.

I have not yet learned to mimic Riley’s confidence in God’s beauty, the way she sees herself as His creation.  She looks at photos when it’s only her and immediately says, “Wow, I look so good,” and this, at least for her, is not conceit or vanity, but the submission of a pure heart.  She utters this as fact, plainly accepted, not as an assessment, and I think that’s because—and this is God’s grace–she naturally sees herself in the reflection of His loving gaze.

I have temporarily settled, but with limited success, for practicing the discipline of silence, trying not to comment about myself at all, even in my thoughts.  If I can not be body positive, maybe I can be body neutral. But instead, I still so often compare myself to some unforgiving and unrealistic ideal as defined by…whom?

My friends and family?  No.  The people who love me have been continually kind.

God?  Definitely not.

Intimately, I know what God has said, that man looks on the outward appearance, but He looks on the heart. I know that Jesus warned, do not judge by mere appearances.  I know that God defines beauty not merely as an outward construct but as an inward reality.

This is His Word on the subject: Let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious.

Adorning, actually the harmonious order of things, a word used interchangeably for the created world, the beauty of which expresses the intrinsic force of God’s masterful creative wisdom; imperishable, absolutely untarnished by time; gentle, imbued with God’s strength under His control; quiet–and this word God used to inscribe something deep in me, hesyxios, “being tranquil by not misusing words that would stir up destructive commotion.”

To God, this is beauty. Costly beauty.

He exchanged the riches of heaven, gave Himself, gave more than I can fully appreciate, to restore real everlasting beauty to me.

So, this is what He’s training me to see:  Those unforgiving and unrealistic ideals I use for comparison and self-assessment, though they may be influenced by others, have certainly been defined by me, as a standard for beauty far from God’s own definition.  It’s an unpopular term these days, but this forfeit of God’s definition of things, God calls this sin, also captivity.

I’ve noticed that my own unreliable attitudes, feelings, and in-the-moment insecurities significantly influence the way I critique a photo of myself, and this morning, to be honest, I feel particularly brutalized by the natural changes happening in my body.

I open my eyes. And fall.

Inwardly, I groan that my face looks too full.  I chastise myself for wearing such a flowy blouse.  I look like an apple with pretty legs, I’m thinking, as I quickly zoom out to give myself some space again from, well, me.  Destructive commotion, indeed.  Tranquility interrupted.

I had chosen the blouse for comfort and because of the color—a lush green, the shade of tree leaves just before the rain when they’re turned to receive, when, far from starved, they’re accustomed to slaking their thirst.  Flowy things feel self-forgetful to me.  Free.  I put on that blouse like a garment of praise, with a snatch of poetry on my tongue, from Kate Baer’s Robyn Hood:  Imagine if we took back the time spent thinking about the curve of our form…the years welcomed home in a soft, cotton dress. I have that poem taped to the mirror in my bathroom.

But now, all that stolen away, I wish I’d have been thinking about how the silhouette would look in a photo, how it must have looked to other women at the event.

This is a lie that my Self swallows like sour candy, this assumption that most other people go about thinking on how I look, and also, that they’re thinking things I never think about them.  It doesn’t occur to me that they, like me, entertain the temptation to self-hate instead of love others.  Self-consumption—or, to use what has now become a trendy psychological description, narcissistic tendency–sweeps through society like a plague, but not a new one.  Most of us are so busy feeling inadequate ourselves that we hardly think about anyone else at all.

Vanity is, of course, not the only way to describe this problem.  The temptation comes dressed in many costumes.  Your self-defined standard for assessment and comparison may look more like fitness or independence or strength, whatever you use apart from God to measure your worth, and mine employs more than one disguise, too.

Before the photo came through, the person leading our morning meditation encouraged us to imagine Christ looking on us with love. This reminded me of something a friend once told us, that when he prays for others, he imagines Christ hugging them. Sometimes, I need to imagine Him hugging me, too.

I click away from the photo and toss my phone away, recognizing it as a hindrance, wondering–

What if I, turning back now to fix my gaze on Him, turning back to begin again, could rest in His embrace, in the intimate knowledge that He looks on me, too, and with love?  It is, we all know it, the iconic picture of groom and bride, that exclusive gaze.  I’ve seen it in the way my parents look at each other now, both silvered and soft with age, how their bodies, each instinctively turning toward the other after years upon years of knowing, form a harmonious one, a union reflecting a greater marriage, gentle, quiet, and absolutely precious in God’s sight.