Breaking the Mold

This morning I read an article that really disturbed me and saddened me.  A woman died after supposedly injecting herself with Vaseline in order to give herself a breast augmentation.  (You can read the full article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/20/sonia-perez-llanzon-dies-vaseline-breasts_n_4999990.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular)  Her son misses her.  She is remembered as a marathon runner and a boxer.  Not as a woman with small breasts.

There has been a bigger outcry lately against photoshopped women and advertisements in stores that only feature "skinny"  models.  Yet the pursuit of that look remains.  We are a society obsessed with perfection.  We are our own worse critics.  Every morning we get up and look in the mirror and it's a rare person that can be completely satisfied with what they're seeing.  Why is that?  I think it's because we grow up with an idea in our heads that we are supposed to look a certain way and dress a certain way.  Society tells us that if our waist expands beyond a certain point, then it's very, very bad, and we should feel very, very bad and very, very guilty.  This is where things become twisted.  We should love ourselves enough to want to stay healthy, not hate ourselves enough to torture our bodies into submission.  We should recognize that the look we have is uniquely ours, and does not belong to any other woman.  We should celebrate that.  We should own that.

Beyond that, what should scare us the most is the attention that gets paid to what we put on the outside of ourselves, but the apathy and lack of interest with what we put into ourselves and what we can offer to other people.  Are we becoming our best selves by continually finding fault with our skin, hair, breast size, waist circumference, clothes, teeth?  We are not.  There's making small changes in order to feel better about ourselves.  Then there's obsession.  What should we be obsessed with?  We should be obsessed with becoming our best selves, not forcing ourselves into a mold that was never designed to hold us in the first place.

I teach a large class of twelve and thirteen year old girls at my church.  I try to impress upon them on a weekly basis that they are unique, special, talented, beautiful, and that they each have something to offer to this world.  I tell them every Sunday that they are daughters of God, that He loves them, and that they each have something important to do. If this applies to twelve and thirteen year old girls, then it applies to their mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers; it applies to women everywhere.  Not a single woman on this earth is exempt from this.  We are all daughters of God.