Boxes, Bags and Self Image - "A Girl's Only" Blog

The 4th (and final) term of school started last week Wednesday and I was brutally taken from my beloved 2-week hibernation with term projects, graduation plans, letters, sports practices and plane tickets. By Friday (the third day of school), I was exhausted. I really looked forward to this weekend so I could simply take a step back and breathe for the first time in 72 hours... 

And if you think about it, that's exactly what I've done. 

Today is Sunday. 

• I woke up
• I got dressed (this is an achievement for me, please understand this.)
• I went to Palm Sunday Service
• I checked Facebook
• I even took a nap

Oh, and I packed up most of my life into 3 black plastic bags...

Yeah. 

All my life I have been collecting things. I have lived in two countries, made thousands of memories, wrote ten thousand words and loved one boy. And yeah, I have accumulated an insane amount of stuff in both places. Just looking around my room I see the Beta House flag, neon pink nail polish, 'Anna Karina', a Spanish Bible, a cup full of pens, sparkling berry bliss lotion, two teddy bears and a bunny. I have some pretty random crap, guys, just like you. 

But now, this chapter in my life is coming to a close and packing all these things away into boxes is just another step necessary to move on. I am sifting through things (mostly clothes right now), and piling them against the wall outside my room. The 'give aways', the 'throw aways' and the 'keeps', all mashed up against my wall. As I was standing there, looking at the Mound of Mostly Useless, I came to a very scary realization. I have spent the last couple years - my senior year mainly - hiding behind what I have. 

Even in a seemingly weaker society where materialism is supposedly a lesser issue, it is very a prevalent battle and I struggle with never having enough, or rather, never being enough. I have shamefully based my confidence - my identity - in what I look like to other person.  I have struggled with my self-image like millions of girls have before me; I have wondered whether or not I will ever be pretty enough. Now, having a boyfriend has quieted these voices more than I ever thought possible, but there is apart of me that still hates what I look like. Until recently, I was able to wear jeans and go on living my life with contacts. I hate that I have to wear glasses for Banquet and Graduation. I hate that I can't wear jeans until I leave country. For a long, long time, I hated what I saw when I looked in the mirror. And now some days, I can only tolerate it. 

I am simply not content with what I look like when I don't hide behind all the stuff I have. 

My makeup hides my imperfect skin. My clothes hide a body I am not proud of. My plastic smile hides the inadequacies I feel comparatively. 

But in reality, every part of me is a gift - a treasure known and loved by God. Awhile ago, I was told that if I look in the mirror and cringe, I cringe at God's masterpiece.

I cannot let my stuff define me, and neither can you. We are a generation of materialism and greed. We can never have enough. We can never be good enough. We can never be beautiful enough. 

So what would you do if I say that I agree with you?? What would you do if I told you that you aren't good enough? or that you will never be beautiful enough?

What would you do if I told you that because you don't have enough, you are a miserable disaster. 

It's like a slap in the face, right? 

This isn't an excuse to buy the whole world and bedeck yourself in layers and layers of plasticity. No. It means that you don't have enough and you will never have enough simply because you're looking for all the wrong things.  

You need God to be truly beautiful. That is all.

Think of it like this, you will never be perfect physically because God is a loving God. How sick and boring life would be if we all looked the same? How ordinary. If we all had that perfect stomach or that perfect hair we have envied for years, wouldn't it make sense that if we all had that American Eagle tan and perfect body, no one would be ever be beautiful? We are creatures of imperfection to glorify a perfect Creator. When a woman is  really, really beautiful, she has the perfection of her Savior shining through her cracked imperfection.

And really? As hard as it is to accept such a trivial answer, God loves us and He cares about the appearance of our hearts and minds much more than whether or not we have a gap between our thighs. And to Him, if we are pursuing True Beauty and running toward the reason why we are here, we are the most beautiful things alive. 

Don't let your identity be one that is easily packed away into a box or a bag. Your identity is who you are, a precious gift. Don't waste it. Your identity is the name the God of the Universe calls you by, a beautiful princess. Don't you dare cover it up.  

Now ask yourself....

"Am I Beautiful?"

From,

-M

"If Jesus gives us a task or assigns us to a difficult season, every ounce of our experience is meant for our instruction and completion if only we'll let Him finish the work. I fear, however, that we are so attention-deficit that we settle for bearable when beauty is just around the corner."  --Beth Moore

Among the Beaches and the Palm Trees - a Thank You

The story of life, friends, a little love, and a God who carries me through. 

I'd like if you take a journey with me to a place I call home and experience a little something I call 'family'. 

**In case you're wondering, we always look like this. Trust me, my class is the best one out there. The good, the bad, the sane and the senile - we're all here, happy and unashamed. We took this on our Senior Retreat on the shores of an uninhabited island straight out of a National Geographic magazine. Be jealous my friends, Papua New Guinea is the most beautiful country in the world.

Home is usually defined through the confines of a building. We take our first steps as a child in the safe haven of our home, we take our boyfriend or girlfriend home to meet our parents for the first time, we go back home after a long day of work. This is normal. 

Family is usually defined by direct, blood relation. Your mom, your pop, your sisters and brothers are the first people you learn to love based on your differences and supposed hatred toward each other. You bond with your family in a way rare to the outside world. But if a family's doing the right things and living as a household under God, a family's love is unbreakable. This is the typical picture of a family- live, pray, love, family.

But spending the past three years as a Missionary Kid really shakes things up when it comes to the crucial questions like who am I? and where do I belong? I no longer view my house in the United States as my home. My dad had made incredible renovations to make the simple modular house into a spectacular home for the time - we lived in it for 11 years. And to say that I no longer view that place as my home is not saying I do not still cherish the memories, still learn from my expediences and love the people I have met. I love my friends in the States, I miss them desperately and I can't wait until I see them in a few short months. I simple do not view the building I lived in for 11 years as my home anymore. But home for me, is something different entirely. 

I believe that my home is wherever family is. 

You can take this several different ways:

1. Wherever my actual, blood-related family reside my home will as well

2. the Body of Christ 

3. The deep relationships that are sometimes forged through fire are just as much family as my blood brothers and sisters. Wherever they go, wherever they are, all over the world - that is my home. 

If you couldn't tell, I lean toward the third option. I'm not saying that the above two are wrong, because they're not. They are essential and just as full of love as the last. But number 3 gives me a different kind of hope I believe only people who live overseas can understand. I hope you can grasp the love I feel for these people when I say the senior class of UISSC is like a second family to me. You don't get that in the States. You just don't. How incredibly blessed I am. 

So often in the missions field, friends leave you seemingly all alone. In all honesty, I can't speak for this because I have been blessed to be in a class whose parents planned their furloughs so they wouldn't have to leave their sophomore, junior or senior years. But there are other things that can take a family way in a matter of days, leaving the missions field a very uncertain place. Life is full of unpredictability here. (But I do have had a very special friend leave last year from a grade below me and she is what makes this blog a little more credible.)

Having a friend in Ukarumpa is something that exceeds many surface-level friendships in the States.  Wait! Don't kill me yet for I fear I have just overstepped my bounds. What I mean to say is to have a friend here is to have a relationship for life. People move and people leave so frequently that MK's and missionaries alike forge deep friendships at sometimes record speeds (I'm talking in general terms, of course. There are people who don't, but for the sake of my point, pretend there aren't) and these fast friends can last a lifetime. But sometimes, especially in the month of June for Ukarumpa families, life is rather dull when friends leave to their home-countries. 

But there is a hope among this chaos - a hope that makes saying goodbye worth it. Now, all over the world (I'm not kidding: Papua New Guinea, South Korea, Finland, Australia, Germany, Romania, China, Japan. They really are everywhere), I have friends for life. That is a very special feeling for a person like me, just about 2 months away from climbing into a plane that will take me away from my home and into a place that is everything but completely foreign to me, knowing that I will have opportunities to see many of them again. Most of my class is likely attending US colleges - which is even more encouraging - but it's also a cool concept knowing that I really do have family all across the globe. 

I have cried with many of the guys and the girls in my class as we have faced both similar and divergent burdens and trials throughout the years. Especially lately. We have come closer than ever before knowing that the life we're living now will soon come to a close as a new chapter unfolds.   have come to love like I have never loved before. 

All I want to say now is thank you. Thank you for accepting me and thank you for all the memories. You will always have a place in my heart...always. 

We are united. Under one God, we will live forever in a place where there are no more goodbyes. 

From,

-M

Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in your midst?

1 Corinthians 3:16