Well right now I am on the other side of the world visiting Southeast Asia. I probably won’t disclose the exact location until I get back, but if you want a hint I can tell you that Passion will be doing a concert here on August 3. That’s all I’m going to say!

So far the trip has been amazing! We have visited the biggest Muslim mosque I’ve ever seen (I had to wear a pink robe that covered my head so that I wouldn’t defile the temple–I looked HOT!) and then we went to a Hindu temple that seemed like it was straight out of the Old Testament. People were sacrificing offerings to golden idols and everything!

But one thing that has stood out to me the most has been the presence of women wearing the full, black Muslim covering. These women are actually tourists from the Middle East, not native to the country, but there are a lot of them around so they constantly grab my attention. I can’t help but wonder what it must be like to stare out at the world from a complete veil, no one seeing anything about you but your eyes.

But the fascinating thing about these women is that, while their entire bodies are completely covered, hiding any kind of distinguishing features about their bodies, these women still went out of there way to stand out. Many of them had the cutest little shoes I’d ever seen, or they carried beautiful, eye-catching purses. It was as if they were trying to find a way to make themselves beautiful, even though their bodies were completely hidden from the world.

I love that. I think it reflects something inherent and irrepressible about the female heart. No matter what the world does to hide it, God created women to be beautiful, and He desires that we celebrate that beauty. Our beauty reflects something true about the character of God, so we should never strive to hide it.

That doesn’t mean we should pursue vanity and become obsessed with our looks, but it does mean that at our very essence, there is something about us that reflects the beauty of God, and we should never be ashamed of it. Sometimes that even means resisting our culture’s perception of beauty, knowing that society can also hide our beauty by calling undesirable that which God called lovely. When this happens, Western culture is just as guilty of suppressing a woman’s natural beauty as a strict Muslim culture might be.

Wherever you are in the world today, celebrate who you are! God created you with purpose and detail, so I pray that He helps you to appreciate and love yourself just as much as He does.

Well I’m off to have more adventures on the other side of the world. I’ll try to check back in soon!

The other day I saw a t.v. show interviewing women over the age of 30 who’d decided to have plastic surgery. Specifically, they’d all had breast implants.

Now this was a bit surprising to me. When I think of breast implants, I think of women in their twenties who are perhaps hoping it will boost their specific careers.

But that simply isn’t the case anymore. An article in USA Today reported that from 2000 to 2005 the number of women getting breast implants increased 37%, and as the article described, “The typical person getting breast implants today is not the stripper, the model…It’s the girl down the street.”

What’s more, she’s not so much a “girl” either. She’s a woman–a wife and a soccer mom, most likely with a bachelors degree. A survey done in 2003 found that the average age of women receiving breast augmentation was 34.

About a month ago I wrote about the growing trend of anorexia in women over the age of 30, so given those statistics the rise in breast implants should be no surprise. The only difference is that there’s a stigma attached to one, and not to the other. Anorexia is frowned upon by the general population, but breast implants are becoming more and more accepted.

That brings us back to the show I was watching the other day. As the women being interviewed discussed their decisions, their reasons tended to be more personal than professional. They’d always wanted bigger breasts, or they simply wanted a makeover.

But one woman raised a dissenting voice. She argued that women only have this surgery if they are suffering from low self-esteem or have a poor body image. By having breast implants, they are attempting to prop up their self-esteem in an artificial way.

“Finally!” I thought. A voice of reason in a backwards world!

But she was quickly dismissed. One of the other women immediately replied that her self-esteem was just fine and that she’d always had tremendous confidence. Her reason for having the surgery? “I’m doing it for me.”

As soon as the words came out of her mouth, I wanted to start shaking my t.v. set. I wanted to sit that women down and ask her, “What do you mean you’re doing it for you? Where do you think the desire to have bigger boobs came from? It’s not like you cooked it up in your own brain independent of the culture you live in! You’re doing it because society has fed you the lie that women with larger breasts are more beautiful and desirable. The idea that you’re doing it for you is all an illusion!”

Unfortunately, I am not able to sit down with that women and tell her those things….which probably wouldn’t have gone over too well anyway. But I do have a blog, so I’m going to state it here:

Be careful when you hear yourself utter the words, “I’m doing it for me.” Yes, there are times when this motivation is warranted–if, for instance, you are extremely overweight and you need to do a better job of being healthy. Take the necessary steps to make that happen.

But don’t use these words to mask the real problem. It is most likely that you have been so profoundly influenced by society that you don’t even know what’s you, and what’s the culture.

The key to determining the difference can be found in Scripture. Are you making changes that are consistent with the Scriptural depiction of the human being? If you are trying to be healthy, then yes! Our bodies are the temple of God, so we should be good stewards of them.

But if you are attempting to make drastic, superficial changes to the body God has given you, whether it be through surgery, extreme dieting, or over-exercising, then you will find yourself in conflict with the truths of Scripture. The Bible tells us that we are made in God’s image, and that God knit us together in our mother’s womb. This implies an intimate, intentional purpose in every single part of your body and personality, so any attempt to alter that creation runs the risk of insulting God. It questions His judgment in making you the way that you are.

(And please don’t interpret this to mean that I am promoting some sort of Christian Science position in which doctors should not help people born with birth defects. Scripture shows us examples of healing in the lives of individuals whose day-to-day functioning was impaired from birth. Such surgery is certainly permissible, but it’s in an altogether different category from the kind of changes I have described above.)

In closing, I want to remind each one of you out there that you have been fearfully and wonderfully made. Any message that indicates otherwise does not come from God, so be on your guard against the lies of our culture. We have becomes so inundated by them that we have now begun to deceive ourselves, rather than being speakers of truth.

Ultimately, the best way to determine whether you’re doing what’s best for you, or if you’re simply in bondage to the opinion of others, can be found in the following question: Are you doing it for God? Sometimes the desires we have for ourselves can be deeply misguided, so we should never use our own, personal fulfillment as a barometer of right and wrong. Ultimately it’s about God and what brings the most glory to Him. Anything else is idolatry.

*To read the whole USA Today article, you can check it out here.

Right now I’m in Atlanta hanging out with my 10 year old cousin, and we’ve been having a blast! We’ve gone to Stone Mountain Park, Lake Lanier Water Park, and last night we had a “Camp Rock” sleepover with one of her friends.

(In case you don’t know what “Camp Rock” is, it’s a movie that debuted on Disney last night starring the Jonas Brothers. And if you don’t know who the Jonas Brothers are, then you are hopelessly uncool and I’m afraid I can’t help you.)

My cousin and uncle live in a suburb of Atlanta that is so idyllic it makes me feel like I’m living in the 50′s. All the houses are perfect with nicely manicured lawns, all the kids are friends with each other, all the parents hang out together, and they all go to the same school (which also happens to be amazing–it’s nice and it’s safe and the teachers are wonderful). Oh, and everyone is pretty…even the dads.

And that’s exactly why I’ve always loved coming here to visit. It’s always been the kind of place I wanted to raise my family. However, I’m starting to wonder if it’s not quite as perfect as I always thought. I’ve started to notice something during this trip that I hadn’t noticed before. It first grabbed my attention a couple days ago at my cousin’s swim meet, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since…

I was standing near the pool waiting for my cousin’s race to begin, when I noticed three women standing in front of me. What caught my attention was that they all pretty much looked the same–thin, athletic, toned bodies, blond hair, manicured hands and feet, and cute outfits. From the back, they almost looked like teenagers–but they were in their late 30′s or early 40′s.

As I observed these women I started to feel a little insecure about myself. Not only were they in better shape than I am, but I wondered if I’d be able to make my body look like that after I’d had kids. These women didn’t look like they’d actually given birth to human children! They instead had the bodies of 18 year old girls.

Well I decided to start looking around at the other people nearby so that I would stop feeling so insecure about myself, but to my dismay I saw exactly the same thing. Actually that’s a lie–some of the women were brunettes. But they were all skinny, toned, and cute. There were a couple women who had, well, women’s bodies, but they were the exception to the rule.

At first I thought, “Is this what lies ahead for me? Does the quest for model-like bodies never end?” But then I comforted myself with the idea, “This probably isn’t normal. I bet it’s just this neighborhood. Surely there can’t be many communities like this one.”

I was wrong.

The next day my cousin and I went to the water park, and I saw more moms with breast enhancements than I ever thought possible. They were as skinny as rails and you could see the muscle tone in their stomachs. Again, not all of the women looked like this, but there were enough of them to be noticeable. After all, this wasn’t Los Angeles–this was an Atlanta suburb! What is going on here??

Well I think I found a possible explanation…

USA Today recently ran a story revealing that more and more women over 30 are struggling with eating disorders. It explains, “Eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia have long been considered diseases of the young, but experts say in recent years more women have been seeking help in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and older.” The article then cited the following distressing statistics:

In the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park, Park Nicollet Health Services’ Eating Disorders Institute saw 43 patients ages 38 and older in 2003 — about 9% of its total patients. For the first six months of this year (2007), the institute has treated nearly 500 patients 38 and older, about 35% of its total.

The Renfrew Center, a network of treatment centers in the eastern U.S., said about 20% of the 522 patients treated at its Philadelphia center in 2005 were 30 or older. In 2006, about 13% of the 600 patients were in that age group.

Body image is no longer the concern of teenage girls alone. Women of all ages are feeling pressure to look a certain way and to fit a particular mold. And it’s no wonder! It’s not as though you spend years feeling a certain way about your body, and then suddenly wake up one day feeling fine. In fact, the pressure is bound to get worse as your body fights the effects of age. If you give in to your insecurities now, and if you believe the lies that society tells women about their bodies, then you are sentencing yourself to a losing battle.

Now it’s not as though I think that all women are doomed to be overweight once they have children, so we should embrace obesity. It’s important for us to take care of our bodies, eat healthy, exercise, and maintain our beauty as a gift to our husbands.

BUT, there is also a degree to which we should celebrate our bodies the way God made us. The fact of the matter is that having children requires us to sacrifice our bodies. We’ll get stretch marks and we’ll gain weight in areas we never gained weight before. Our bodies will bear the marks of bringing a new life into the world.

Yet those marks that we so despise are actually marks of beauty! God created the gift of life, and women get to serve a blessed role in that process, so whatever God calls good, we must also call good. Fight the message that our culture sends women to look a certain way. Take care of your bodies, yes, but rejoice in the journey of life, and all the sags, bags and bulges it brings along with it. Our culture may reject those signs of aging as being ugly and undesirable, but Scripture reminds us that “Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.”

*In case you’d like to read the whole USA Today article that I cited above, you can check it out here.

A couple days ago I was talking to a friend about a book she’s been reading that’s been really encouraging to her. The book deals with lies that women tend to believe about themselves, which is definitely a relevant topic to women, so I took a look at it. As I glanced over the Table of Contents and read the lies that the author identifies, there were a lot of lies that she had pin-pointed, and most of them hit the nail on the head in my life. However, there was one lie that stuck out to me, one I didn’t agree with: The lie that “We must learn to love ourselves.”

Now let me say up front that I haven’t read the chapter, so I cannot pass any kind of real judgment on the material contained inside of it, but my friend summarized it as follows: We do not need to learn to love ourselves, because we already do. God commanded us to love others “as we love ourselves,” and this command implies that we already love ourselves. That being said, the challenge is not loving ourselves, but loving others. If anything, we need to spend less time thinking about ourselves.

This argument is a common one. You will hear many a Christian argue against the self-centeredness of our culture. We love to think about ourselves and how to best serve ourselves. And for that reason, any teaching that encourages us to love ourselves *more* would surely feed our self-centeredness all the more.

While there is some truth to this claim, I must admit that I largely disagree. The kind of “love” to which these people are referring is not love at all–it’s vanity. And we must never confuse love with vanity, because the two are exact opposites. In reality, vanity comes from the same source as low self-esteem. Both the vain person and the person with low self-esteem are constantly thinking about themselves and how to make themselves feel better, worthier, greater. The only difference is that the vain person is succeeding.

That being said, self-centeredness must never be confused with love. If love and self-centeredness were the same thing, then to fulfill the command of “loving others as you love yourself” would mean placing an unhealthy emphasis on others. Rather than being in bondage to pleasing yourself, you’d be in bondage to pleasing others.

With this in mind, our standard for loving others must not assume that we are loving ourselves well. If we love ourselves poorly, then we will subsequently love others poorly as well. So how do we love ourselves rightly? By loving ourselves in a way that honors God. Our first priority should never be ourselves–it should always be God. Everything we do should center on God and our love for God. Once we get to the point where God is the center, everything else in our lives will fall into its right place. Instead of putting ourselves first, which will subsequently lead to a life centered around serving ourselves, we’ll learn to love ourselves in a way that keeps God first, and glorifies Him. The goal will be God’s glory, not our glory, so the way in which we love ourselves will fall in line with that priority.

Let me give you an example of this: One way to love yourself is by loving your body, not because it draws attention to you or makes other people jealous of you, but because God created you in His image, so your body is therefore beautiful. Or, you can love your personality, not because it makes you popular and everyone likes you, but because God shaped your personality in a certain way, and all of your gifts are echoes of God’s own identity. In this way, loving your body and loving your personality are simply ways of loving God, and worshipping God. This kind of love does not lead to vanity, but to blessed self-forgetfulness. We are no longer thinking, “me, me, me,” because we only have eyes for God.

So, I disagree with the author of my friend’s book–we do need to learn to love ourselves, because love ourselves is an integral part of loving God. And this is SO important for women, given the way culture teaches us to hate the bodies and minds we have been given, thereby stripping God of glory that is rightfully His.