Embracing

I’m glad that I’m a woman, but I admit I continue to struggle with some aspects of my body. I know I’m not alone in that. Most women have things about their appearance they would like to change. Those with curly hair prefer straight and vice versa. Lots of women don’t like their feet. I don’t like my arms. Women feel they are too tall, too short, too small breasted or too large! (OY!) You name it, we don’t like it.

The thing is, God created you you. He created your hair, your feet, your arms, your fabulous body. And God does all things well. Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and the temple of the Holy Spirit is beautiful.

You are a lovely creation. (And yes, so am I!) Our body is a gift to us through which we experience God’s grace in every form of living.

Making peace with our bodies will lead us to a great good. Although it can take some time—particularly if your life has been thick with not liking your body so much—it is worth pursuing. God made our body. He loves it. He wants us to love it, care for it, and bless it too!

We get to—God wants us to—be thankful for and bless all of our parts, even the jiggly bits! Right now, God is saying this about you:

How beautiful you are, my darling!
Oh, how beautiful!
Your eyes are like doves. (Song 4:1 nasb)

God thinks we’re beautiful. Today. He accepts us! He not only accepts us, He embraces us. Body and soul. He made our unique personalities just as he crafted our unique forms. Embracing ourselves is a stretch for most of us, but consider: Jesus commands us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. How can we love our neighbor as ourselves if we do not love ourselves? How can we become joyful women if we are unable to ever see the humor in our own folly? We do grow into becoming more our true embraceable selves as we repent of areas in our lives that have nothing to do with faith or love, but God does not live in a perpetual state of disappointment over who we are. He enjoys us! Berating ourselves for our flaws and weaknesses only serves to undermine our strength to become the woman each of us was created to be.

See, our hope doesn’t rest on our finally getting it together. Our hope rests in Jesus. He alone is perfect, and He has promised in His Word that we are—each one of us—being transformed into His very image. Whether we feel like it or not! And Jesus has also proven once and for all that He loves us. The center of His heart is fiery devotion, fierce love, and a passionate pursuit of y-o-u. He not only loves you—He likes you. You get to like you, too. Which includes no longer shunning yourself, but embracing yourself.

Now before you get too worried, know that embracing ourselves has nothing to do with arrogance or pride, nor is it settling for a lower version of who we are meant to be. Embracing ourselves has everything to do with embracing the goodness of God’s creative work in us. It means trusting God, believing that all He has made is glorious and good. And that includes us. You are the only one who can be you. You are the best you there has ever been!

So who are you?

Well, what do you like? If you could do anything and know that it would go swimmingly well—what would it be? What do you want the impact of your life to be?

About fifteen years ago in a small group, my husband, John, shared some thoughts about desire, that core place in our hearts where God speaks, and then he invited us to write down what we wanted. To write a long list and not edit it. Nothing was too small or large to write down. My list turned out to be two pages long and had things on it as varied as the garden I wanted to nurture, the hope to ride horses, and the healing I longed for a few dear ones to experience.

I found that list a few years ago, and to my astonishment every single item had come true. It had happened! I needed to make a new list! I have!

God is a Dreamer. He has dreams of you and for you.

It’s good to dream. We can’t out-give God. We can’t out-love him, and we can’t out-dream him. Give yourself permission to dream big! Dream deep. Dream wide.

It’s good to sit with God in the quiet and ask Him to reveal to you: what do I want? And ask him, what do You want for me? I do know that one of the things He wants is your heart to become more alive, more awake, and more aware of his pleasure over who you are—right in this moment.

Awakening to the dreams that God has placed in your heart isn’t about getting stuff or attaining something. It’s about embracing who you are and who He has created you to be. In Him. He is our dream come true, and the one true love of our life. But we can’t love Him with our whole hearts when our hearts are asleep. To love Jesus means to risk coming awake, to risk wanting and desiring.

God gives us our dreams, and we give them back to Him. By dreaming with Him, we aren’t demanding they come true. We are simply owning the reality that they are a part of us. And since they are a part of us, we embrace them. Because God does.

Besides, if you don’t have a dream, how can you have a dream come true?