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The Other Side Of Vanity Whose approval am I seeking? by Carrie Francis The topic of study at an all-women's Bible study one night was Vanity. I went into it thinking, "This isn't really something I struggle with." I mean, I'm a t-shirt and jeans girl who rarely wears makeup and doesn't spend much time on her appearance. But as we got into it, I started realizing the ways that I am vain and the vanity issues that I do struggle with. I mean, let's be honest here, I'm no size 6, let alone a zero! I'm not the twig with a chest that our culture calls beautiful. There have been a lot of times I've wondered if guys would describe me as having a "great personality" (code: "not hot"). At least that's the way Hollywood spins it. I'm also as tall as a lot of the guys I'm around, and I've known some guys with major height inferiority complexes. Sometimes I wonder, maybe if I were a couple inches shorter, 10-20 pounds lighter, a few sizes smaller, would guys like me then? My freshman year of college, this guy, I think jokingly (in retrospect, that is!), asked if I'd go out with this other freshman guy (given a specific gift of a cactus ... long story). To be honest, the thought had never crossed my mind, ever. I mean he was this big, good-looking football player, and who was I? The quiet nerd girl/band geek. Never mind he'd been in band too, because those were some of the cockiest guys I'd known in high school: the band-football guys. I remember thinking, "why would a guy like that like a girl like me?" And then I went, "Whoa! What the heck am I believing here? Why couldn't he like me? What lies have become so engrained in my heart?" I went through a pretty intense 2-week period of serious pain and total distraction. As much as it hurt, it did expose some major lies I'd blindly accepted at some point and just believed. Lies that told me that I wasn't good enough or pretty enough, and I was too smart, too quiet, too reserved, too plain for a guy "like that" to find me attractive. Sometimes my vanity comes up in the form of what I'm doing and how I'm living. Towards the end of sophomore year, I got really bogged down with the way I perceived my campus ministry group defining what a Christian woman should be. Not that anything was explicitly stated, but things like being quiet and submissive toward guys, working and doing even when I felt like I had no support, etc. I was praised for the work I was doing in the group, which of course only re-enforced my perceptions. I was looking to a group of guys to define who I was supposed to be and trying to live up to these invisible standards that I didn't even really know what they were. And I totally lost myself in that. I lost what makes me, me. I lost my joy, my self-confidence, my self-esteem. A good friend I talked with at the time defined it as, "You remember being happy, but you don't know what made you that way. You've forgotten what makes you tick." One verse I keep going back to, though it's totally out of context, but still applicable is Galatians 1:10, "Am I now trying to win the approval of men or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ." As out of context as this is (Paul is actually talking about not making Gentile-Christians get circumcised), it's been a great verse to remember and combat these feelings of inadequacy. I had actually memorized it earlier in the semester, and one afternoon I was thinking about "if I do/look/act this way, would guys accept me then?" and the Galatians verse popped into my head totally "on its own." And it stopped me in my tracks and made me ask, "What am I doing here? Where did the confident tom-boy who didn't need a guy go? Where did this come from?" "I can see the tears filling your eyes and I know where they're coming from. They're coming from a heart that's broken in two by what you don't see. The person in the mirror doesn't look like a magazine, but when I look at you, it's clear to me that I can see the fingerprints of God ... you're a masterpiece that all of creation quietly applauds and you're covered with the fingerprints of God." —Stephen Curtis Chapman