When We Hate The Skin We Come In

“I hate my skin”.  I hear from the backseat.  Words not from a “cutting” teenager….but a seven-year-old.  A child not even a decade. Worse yet, it was my child saying this.

Her preschool aged brother then nonchalantly suggests, “Well then, why don’t you just shave it off.”  I didn’t know whether to cry or laugh at such innocence…Cause the words, “hate”, “my”, “skin” still gripped hard, triggering something painful deep surfacing.

As the days go on….I turn, churn, boil at the the words still alive from the back seat of my crossover.  “It must be school”, I conclude.  Or her birth-mother.  Blame shifting.  Maybe there is some generational thing needing “breaking”.  I keep fishing….It’s our society. Disney.  Me, for putting that Cinderella pillowcase on her bed when she was little.

I mean, for goodness sakes, my dark skinned child sees white faces all day, now blonde hair and blue eyes staring at her…even when she sleeps?

Then the scab lifts further…

• I remember that little girl at our first story time ever.  The one when my daughter was three, who refusing to hold my daughter’s hand, treating her as if contaminated simply because of the color of her skin.
• Toddlers also in childhood, standing in her face, staring rudely as if my daughter is some alien.
• Or the four-year-old stranger who randomly ran up and told her, “Your never coming to my house”, unexpected from the shoe section.  Her mom smirking in joy at her child’s overt racism.

I mean, as women….our skin shouldn’t make us feel unloved and inadequate.  But it does, doesn’t it? It shouldn’t be our battling weapon, the targets for why we judge each other; the object of our words that we use to shoot thoughtlessly, dividing one another.  When truth is…None of us can live up to the airbrushed models we see staring at us from the magazine racks at the grocery store.

And perfectionism, idealism, and harsh words can hurt all of us…can’t they?

Finally, days later, the teakettle of my soul stops simmering.  And there, in the open wound of my own offenses….a memory curls to the top of this boiling mixture I keep coddling…

A memory of me standing in the mirror surfaces, maybe thirteen.  Punching hard at the small pouch around my un-hourglass-ish middle section. Bathrooms, girls, lunchrooms in fourth grade also comes back like a 1920’s picture movie. Kids bragging about who is skinniest, prettiest, tallest…all giving each other a list of how little they had been eating that day.

I was ten years old.

Yes, that was thirty years ago. Before airbrushing, botox, perfect-looking television actresses, and the internet.  I mean, what pressure must young girls have now? 

Still, vain-fully even Eve longed for “more” than she had. Eve’s sin in the garden taking her from being fearlessly naked; to hiding, cowering, covering her skin in shame….like we do now today.  This “needing” of something-more resurrecting from the very core of what we all experience.  The lie that feeds on us making us ungratefully discontent, driving us to idolize what we know we’ll never have.

And yet, we have not learned, this “more”, “better”, “need” “should be” mentality is the very root of all our sin-nature, devouring us until we have anything left but doubt.

And why instead of waving the white flag, do we keep raising the bar, trading God-confidence, trying harder as if that will solve the dark whole of nothingness, running even stronger towards that unreachable Hollywood example of what “real beauty is”.

I mean, will we ever be “beautiful enough”, according to the world?

And why do we let unrealistic expectations devour us as if we were victims, when we were made in the image of God?  Why do we hate our own skin, loathing what God has given us, until we literally might be willing to “shave off our skin” just to look like someone else.

• Is it that we learn power in this world is found in what we physically present?
• Do we learn clothes, and skin color, and body weight make a women…instead of seeking to be clothed by His righteousness…empowered by His love?
• Do we learn beauty equals acceptance, and our identity comes from a perfect image we chase like the proverbial carrot in hopes of meeting others expectations?

And somehow America’s Next Top Model plagues us in our sleep.  And could it be, what we think is entertainment actually makes us enemies of one another….enemies of our own bodies?

But I can tell you,

• God never intended my thirteen-year-old friend to start puking to try to be prettier.
• He never wanted me as an underweight twenty-year-old to keep running, barely eating, desperately seeking to get the surgery to remove my lower two, thick Norwegian ribs.
• Yes, God never intended the young girl I worked with after graduating to drive off a cliff because she was crushed under the pressure of thinking, “No matter how I try, I will never be good enough.  So why try?”

I still see her husband and two sons sitting in the front row of her funeral that day.  

Oh precious ladies, when will we learn that our eyes are fixed on the wrong thing?  When will we learn that our worth is not in our pant size, our body style, or the color of our skin?  Heaven is our hope and He truly is, the joy set before us.  In Him, we are always enough.

So, what if we stopped seeing ourselves with airbrushed eyes of correction, looking past the outward scars and imperfections….and into the hearts of others with the pure, unadulterated, unconditional love of Jesus?  How might bridges be built in relationships?  How might jealousies stop, weapons of words, and anger, and self-hate cease from crucifying us?

What if we looked in the mirror and chose instead to love our flaws, these broken vessels we come in?  What if we trusted the great Craftsman, and instead gave Him praise for this limiting, flawed, imperfect skin our spirits just so happened to be inhabiting? 

For could it be, somehow, we know deep inside….Our Spirits will always feel restrained by these empty, passing, fleeting bodies we come in? 

We were in the store the other day.  A white guy (And I mean a blonde hair, blue eyed guy) in his forties was talking loudly, like a African American gangster.  I stared and watched to see if he was authentic, if it was really that voice in the body I was seeing….

But then I realized…Here my daughter had said she “hated her skin”, while this white guy was coveting what she actually had…color.  Sporting baggy pants, baseball hat, actually genuinely acting African American though clearly born with stark, white skin….

And truth is, we women are not the only ones caught in an identity crisis. Men face it too.

In this world trying to constantly force us to turn inward and spend our days imploding with some unrealistic idealism of beauty, what if we just loved ourselves, finding confidence and assurance that God knew what He was doing when He decided to make us?

“God doesn’t make mistakes sweetie.  He created you.  He thinks you are beautiful….and so do I.”  I finally tell my seven-year-old in the back seat as we drive.

But even I know mere words can’t make us stand taller, sing stronger, love our bodies, or look people in the eyes…not doubting at all who we were created to be.  Only Christ’s Spirit resurrected in us can do that.

So, ladies, what if we dressed ourselves in the Word each morning, instead of looking in the world’s mirror? What if we turned to Christ to find our true identity, instead of coveting the pages of airbrushed magazines? What if we listened to the Master Craftsman whose image we were made in, instead of those girls in the lunchroom, the voices in us that drive us off cliffs saying “You will never be enough”. 

For no matter what our insecurities, no matter how may scars or all the imperfections plaguing us…God says you are beautiful!  And our God never lies.

Will you join me right now, stopping to listen to what He says?  Asking Him to help you “really get” that He loves you?  Because friend, regardless of what the world tells us….He thinks your beautiful just the way you are!

• “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful..” Psalms 139:14  
• “Do not consider appearance or height…The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.” 1 Samuel 16:7 
• “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised.” Psalms 32:30 
• “You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you.”  Song of Solomon 4:7 
• “Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed.” Psalms 34:5