I had a very interesting experience as a woman visiting Italy last month. I absolutely love traveling and I always observe a number of fascinating cultural differences whenever I go to a new place, but this one caught me off guard. And before I explain why, please don’t think I’m fishing for compliments. I know that I’m beautiful in my own way - I try to know my strengths as well as my flaws and I’m still in the process of mastering them.
In fact, I think that is the largest reason why it caught me off guard. Knowing that I’m beautiful and feeling beautiful are acutely different things. I have no shortage of people in my life who know and love me and who wouldn’t hesitate to compliment me if they ever knew I felt fat or frumpy, but some kind of reason would normally have to exist for such a comment to be made. This led to my being so *happily* shocked by what I found in Italy. It felt like I must have received more compliments in just the first week of being in Florence than I had in the last decade up till then. Imagine that! But it wasn’t the fact that I was being noticed that made me feel pretty (Ok, it didn’t hurt)... I found that it had a lot to do with my own attitude too. In America we are constantly surrounded by advertisements and images of idealized beauty. Whether or not we agree with or even mean to look at them, the constant bombardment of billboards, magazines, and commercials becomes a part of our subliminal mindset. It informs how we perceive each other and ourselves, and it affects both men and women equally. So once all those things are gone and the only standards of beauty you are surrounded by are ancient sculptures (portraying women of all sorts of body types - yes, usually curvy) it changes the mentality of the society as a whole. I no longer felt like I was being constantly compared to something else. I was seen as beautiful simply because I am a beautiful woman. And so were all the other women. The positive feedback loop was created as I also stopped comparing myself to those unspoken impossible standards. I started looking in the mirror and liking the curves and lumps that I saw - not because they had become any different, but because suddenly they were no longer a roadblock in between me and my perceived value. It’s sad to realize in hindsight that the reason I’ve hated my lumps while in America was only because I subliminally thought they were standing in the way of me being truly accepted and loved. It was also amazing to see how incredibly fast that changed the instant I was no longer surrounded by that environment of comparison. Comparison is toxic!! And it goes way beyond appearances. Comparing any benchmark, achievement, or feature about yourself to someone else immediately poisons your own ability to grow because you’re only looking for ways to put one person over another instead of looking for ways to bring all people up. It immediately creates the dichotomy of a winner and a loser instead of choosing to see the equal value in both. Once you lose the ability to see value in yourself, you also lose your ability to receive God’s best for you. You consider Him a liar because you reject His most fundamental truth: that you are worth loving and being sacrificed for. Likewise when you lose the ability to see the value in others you lose the ability to love them. You lose God’s heart for them and take on the world’s heart instead, which is far more fickle, biased, and destructive. It begins to tear you both down instead of building you both up. It’s therefore no surprise to me that in a society that worships comparison we find it so difficult to love one another without judgement or bias. In order for us to love one another as Jesus loves us and to live in peace with one another, we must first make an intentional effort to set all comparison aside. I’ve fallen deeply into that trap at different times in my life and it would appear that it was still affecting me even when I didn’t think I was struggling with it. I know how hard it is to truly maintain God’s perspective while we remain surrounded by the world and all its trappings, but it’s a challenge worth taking on and worth helping keep each other accountable of as well.
0 Comments
|
ErikaJeremiah 29:11 Archives
March 2023
Categories |
|