Mary the mother of God had armpit hair, as did every other holy woman in the Bible. The amount of hair, makeup and fat on their bodies is not what made them worthy of love or respect. Rather, Sarah, Elizabeth and Esther were valuable because God created them. The same goes for you, reader. Male or female, I want you to know and believe that your body is good and beautiful exactly the way God formed it, no modifications necessary. 

PRESSURES IN THE MEDIA

Photoshopped pictures in advertisements do their best to convince both sexes that we need to look a certain way in order to be accepted. Specifically, women are pressured to be living Barbie dolls, while men are prompted to look like an extra from “300”. Products like Proactiv operate on the philosophical assumption that our bodies only have value insofar as they are attractive, and that we will pay lots of money so we can be considered valuable by society’s standards. In short, we tend to care a lot more about what others will think of our bodies than how God sees our bodies.

GOD LOVES OUR BODIES

Recently, I interviewed several Christian women for a project about body image and asked “Do you love your body?” Most of them said no. It made me sad, but I understood why. Like the women I interviewed, I’ve spent my whole life disliking my figure, even hating it because of bad acne. Additionally, I gained weight when I came to Biola as I started to physically look more like a woman than a teenager and it made me self-conscious. But God loves my body. God loves our bodies. Why is that so difficult for us to believe?

Maybe men and women of all ages struggle to accept their physicality as divine because, as Christians, we sometimes reinforce the notion that our bodies need to look a certain way to be accepted. In a Relevant article, Emily McFarlan Miller noted that 90 percent of all American churches are 90 percent racially homogenous, according to a national survey conducted in 2000. Occasionally, we take virtues like modesty — covering our bodies because they are sacred — and use harmful rhetoric to make women feel ashamed of their physical identity, as their bodies are dehumanized, becoming an object of temptation.

God made every body we see with love and in his image. The church is composed of every nation, tribe, people and language and we ought to celebrate how our varied phenotypes represent that truth. Yes, our flesh is fallen, but if Jesus sees the human body as worthy of his divinity and if the Holy Spirit is content to dwell in our marrow and tissue, who are we to reject what God clearly loves? Let’s pray together that the Lord will help us to love our bodies, to love ourselves.