I've started to work my way through a new book, and I've vowed to meditate on each section, to post about it so that I can look back and reflect on the growth ... Even if that particular section doesn't speak to me all that loudly, I'm going to make myself sit back and think about it first, then post the thoughts here. So I was reading the first few paragraphs today and the book starts out with the author (Angela Thomas) describing her adolescence. She wasn't the "pretty" girl in her class ... she had braces, she wore glasses ... maybe she wasn't ugly, per se. But she wasn't pretty.
I wasn't either. I needed glasses for reading, computer work, television. I still do, and I always will. But I don't feel pretty in them. I feel like a dork. And I have the hardest time finding ones that look good on my face. And these days I see my oldest daughter, Teenybop, living out that legacy. She is five years old, and she is in glasses already. She hates them. I wonder if this book will give me a lesson that I can share with her ... something I can use to help show her that she is still the same little person with or without those glasses, and that I still think she is wonderful, that I think she is beautiful, and that her glasses don't change that. Then again, maybe the book will give me a lesson of my own ...
I am still not the "pretty" girl. I am an average woman, an overweight mother of two daughters who will also be overweight if I can't get my body under the control of my mind. I have a decent face and like the author of this so-far-great-book, I have never been called ugly. But I have never caught a guy doing a double-take as I walked by either. I am not ugly, but I am also not sensational. The book says this:
"Don't get the wrong impression; no one ever called me ugly, and no one ever laughed in my face. It's just that no one ever noticed." (emphasis mine)
And I can relate more than I want to. While I sympathize with people who were told how ugly they were as children (or indeed even now) ... at least they are noticed. If you are very unattractive, you get noticed for that. People see you. And if you are beautiful, people notice you for that too. They see you. But if you are average? Well then it seems you are like me, a dime a dozen, one like many others. Nothing sensational. No one notices.
But God does. And I'm looking forward to getting into that message, as it is the message of this book ... God thinks I am beautiful. And I believe I will come to really cherish this book, and that it will have quite an impact on me as I read. I can't wait to get to the rest and I hope that I will find my spirit lifted as I read, that I will find a new confidence in the way God sees me, since His view of me is the one that truly matters.
