By Jordan Lee
There are three parts of my body I always find myself wishing looked different: my thighs, the back of my arms, and my hands.
I do this weird, awful, sickening thing and I want to share it with you because maybe, just maybe, you ride the same dang struggle bus that I tend to board each morning.
Last week, I looked over at the dainty hands of a woman sitting next to me on the plane and legitimately thought to myself, “If I had hands like that, I would never have to hide these little sausages in pictures ever again.”
Weird, right?! Hold on, it gets weirder. I looked at my own hands, started tugging at the ‘fat’ on my fingers, envisioning what it would be like to have more slender fingers. I even began to imagine her hands on my wrists. I looked at her long, slender fingers and then squinted one eye, cocked my head to the side, attempting to visualize my hands with those same dainty fingers.
Unfortunately, I hate to admit that that’s only one out of a million times this month I’ve thought and done something like that.
On Saturday, I grabbed my towel and made my way down to the pool at our apartment. I had been working at my desk all morning while my husband was out of town and needed a little bit of a breather. Sadly, I didn’t breathe at all. I didn’t expect to see so many people. The pool typically isn’t busy but on a Saturday afternoon at 92 degrees in Arizona, I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised.
I looked around, flexed my abs, sucked in my gut, and covered the tiny stretch marks on the top of my thighs with my soft cotton towel as I analyzed the innocent women in the pool. It went something like this, “Ugh, her legs are thinner than mine… Oh, and so are hers!” and “I think her legs are thicker than mine. Phew. At least I don’t have the biggest legs here.” (Thanks to ComparedtoWho for the inspiration here.)
I know, it’s awful. But I have to be honest and say that I do it, too. I catch myself doing it at church (shame on me, right?), on the stinking internet as I scroll (aka creep), at the grocery store, and it’s even happened when I’m about to take the stage and speak to hundreds of girls.
Ick. Ew. Ugh. Pathetic.
I have so many girls email me about their struggle with body image asking for advice. Recently, I received a message that read, “How can I learn to see myself as God sees me?”
Most of the time I just want to reply, “Girl, me too. I don’t have a solution.”
Like you, I fail to see myself as God sees me sometimes (okay, real talk: most times). Either I think far too highly of myself or far too little of myself and honestly, both are wrong.
It’s as if I’m trying to find a solution to just how I measure up.
The math just doesn’t work. But Even when I have all intentions to build community and to let myself breathe in God’s grace, comparison creeps up at the most inconvenient moments and then I divide and suffocate myself into a space of complete isolation, feeling trapped in my own head.
Maybe you don’t struggle with body image but maybe you isolate yourself by comparing your work to other women, or your family, or your style, or a combination of all of the above. Maybe you look at others and think…
“More Successful/Less Successful”, “Prettier Instagram Feed/Uglier Instagram Feed”, or maybe even, “Better Christian/Worse Christian.”
We all do it in some capacity. We know that. I think I’ve actually done all three of those, multiple times, on multiple occasions.
Maybe you’ve heard phrases like, “Jesus loves your hot mess” or “Comparison is the thief of joy.” Maybe you’ve been told that you are fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139) and really love the idea but have a really stinking hard time believing it.
So if you’re one of my many sister-friends out there that struggles with seeing yourself as God sees you, I don’t have a perfect solution for the problem but I am learning something important and I want to pass it on to you:
1. We know that it’s normal to compare. It’s normal to dislike something about our bodies or lives. But just because it’s normal doesn’t mean that it’s good.