Bed, Bath & Body Image

      This year has really exposed me to the immense power of body image (I warned you this blog would be all over the place). It has long been a popular issue in articles and posts on my newsfeed and such but I have admittedly rolled my eyes until this past year, where I’ve experienced its effects firsthand with several of my close friends, and perhaps more importantly began noticing its effects in myself. But that is a post for another day (The often-ignored notion that guys struggle with body image as well).

       The disturbing grip that culture has on women is all too familiar, but I believe its far more important than many of us write it off as. Time and time again, I make the ignorant mistake in assuming that girls see themselves the same way other people see them. I recognize beauty in a girl, and I assume she knows she’s beautiful. But the yardstick she is using has been bent and broken and twisted by years of pressure and excessive familiarity with her own appearance, and is consequently incapable of measuring properly. My fresh eyes are seeing a wonderfully intricate creation of God, but her eyes are seeing a one-day-older version of herself. How am I supposed to convince somebody that they are beautiful when they have been trained on a daily basis to believe there are people more beautiful than they are? Is it even my place to do so? 

       The truth is you will never be able to tell them, but you can show them. I believe that REAL love is a natural response to REAL beauty. When we are intentional about understanding others better, we begin catching glimpses of real beauty inside them and in response our love for them grows stronger. That’s how any relationship should look, whether it is romantic or platonic. Deeper understanding runs in tandem with deeper and more genuine love. Girls and guys alike deserve to become more aware of their own beauty by seeing it reflected in the genuine love poured on them by those intentionally invested in their lives. If this were happening on a grand scale, physical pressures and social expectations would dwindle in importance to the vastly superior power of the immeasurable beauty that God graced us with. 

       Tragically, our fascination with the immediate and the convenient leave us ill-trained to pursue any form of deeper understanding. The time we commit to others is often cheap, and as a result our love for them is cheap and insecure. I point at myself before I point at any of you. But my hope is that I can train my eyes to recognize real beauty in people before I recognize worldly beauty, in order that I might have a pure incentive to love them like Christ would. Maybe then, I'll be capable of bringing more light into a life than darkness (Forgive me). Until then, I can only learn. 

Life is freakin' hard, guys.  I'm glad I get to live it with all of you on my team, so to speak. 

Life is for Living

      I hope this first entry doesn't set the tone for future posts, as I intend to write all sorts of things here. I may write song lyrics, or I may humor you with painful psycho-babble. So try not to assume consistency, because I'm an inconveniently inconsistent person. I've already made the mistake of assuming that somebody will consistently read this blog. So I suppose the score is even. Alas, here we go:
       I have heard many a trendy white girl say, "Live in the moment". I've heard this said so often that I've come to interpret it for what the people saying it really mean; "Don't worry about the future, and don't dwell on the past." There is an ironic lack of any real notion that I "Live in the moment" when being told to do so. But considering that a 'moment' is an infinitesimal piece of moving time, I'll admit that absorbing every color and sound and smell that rushes by my boyish face is all too overwhelming to experience and then let go of in an instant. Our memories and dreams are crucial to the integrity of our individual and unique selves, and play irreplaceable parts in the stories we end up telling. All this for a disclaimer: I recognize the importance of past and future as a human being who is brutally in tune with both.
        However, I have began noticing a failure on my part to experience the world as it is regardless of where I am. This struck me most tangibly in Tahoe last week, where I felt a peculiar angst to enjoy my time there that nearly robbed me of my ability to do so. You see, this entire school year I have been pining for an escape to a place like Tahoe where I can melt into the wilderness and bask in the bliss of old friendships. But when I was finally blessed with the opportunity to escape, I panicked. I panicked because I was all too aware that my time there was counting down. Once the timer began, I couldn't think about anything else. And so I kicked my brain into high gear and stared at the lake as hard as I could, trying to 'enjoy' the moment; trying to absorb the things I had looked forward to so fervently, but to no avail.
       I was soon distracted by my brother, Forrest, and surrogate brother Ethan, as they tossed me a cold bottle of coke and sat down on the dock. The night unraveled with priceless conversation and competitive fun in the water. It dawned on me that living in the moment is not something you can do and simultaneously know you're doing. To live in the moment is to involuntarily create a memory that you can only remember later and be grateful for. Perhaps that is why dwelling on the past is so easy for us; it is an instinct to respect the times when we lived genuinely.