FEELINGpretty

This is a nod to another blog I used to have were I shared more of my inner thoughts, feelings, confusions, frustrations and well you get the picture. I was amazed by the number of people who looked forward to reading them and saw them as a source of confidence to ask questions about their faith or feelings and realized that it's normal. So I'm having one of those days really yesterday sucked because the plotter I use at work blew an ink line and literally hemorrhaged cyan ink all over me, my friend Celeste and a few other co-workers as well as the carpet....so I was hating the idea of work today, but then I was scrolling through iTunes looking for something I hadn't listened to in a while, and I came across a song that I think speaks my heart more so than any other song I've ever heard. It's called Beautiful by Bethany Dillion.

The whole song is perfect and I could go on and on about each line but there's a specific part that always gets my heart all knotted up, it goes like this... "...sometimes I wish I was someone other than me. Fighting to make the mirror happy. Trying to find whatever is missing. Wont you help me back, to glory. I want to be beautiful. Make you stand in awe. Look inside my heart and be amazed. I want to hear you say, "who I am is quite enough", just want to be worthy of love. You make me beautiful. You make stand in awe. You step inside my heart and I am amazed. I love to hear you say," who I am is quite enough". You make me worthy of love and beautiful..."

I have spent 100% of my teenage and adult life obsessing about my self image and for what reason? Nobody around me cares what I look like. Do they? I would love to believe that every person I call friend or even acquaintance would never judge my body or look but I'm sure they do and so that lack of faith in my friends causes me to once again turn to the mirror in horror of the person looking back at me. I've been spending a lot of time thinking through this in the last few months, with arrival of a new son or daughter, I need to be in a good place and for me a huge part of that is getting over the image hurdle, and it's something that I definitely do not want to pass on to my kids I want them to be confident no matter what they look like.

So I ask my self how can I feel pretty how do you find that? I see woman walking down the street at the mall or in Mockingbird Station wearing clothes I would never wear and they are larger women, and I just look at them and wonder where the crap does the confidence come from? How can I get it? I want to be beautiful inside and out. I've worked really hard over the last 10 years to better the person I was on the inside and really that involved putting a lot of anger from my past behind me so that the real me, the loving, compassionate, overly emotional, kind person could come out. So that leads me to ask....

Why was I able to let those damaging things from my past go so I could be beautiful on the inside but I struggle so bad to be able to let go of what keeps me from feeling beautiful on the outside? I know in the song she's singing to God but for me I feel like my heart sings that to the world, and I hate that it does. I wish I didn't care about what the world thought, but I do and I think most people do and it's okay to want to beautiful on the outside I don't think it makes you vein or inappreciative of what God gave you it makes you, it makes me human.