A big thank you to Hillarie for writing today's post on Altogether Beautiful! I met Hillarie at YBL, she was a counselor of mine who I connected with mostly over Canada. I really hope you enjoy this :)
↬↫↬↫↬↫↬↫↬↫↬↫↬↫↬↫↬↫↬↫
Hi I'm Hillarie and I had the wonderful privilege of being a counsellor for the YBL camp at Asbury that Elia attended. I am a senior this year at Asbury, and I am honoured that Elia asked me to write something for her blog! She has such an inviting presence and the sun shines out of her smile; it's amazing!
Something that God has laid on my heart to share is my own thoughts on self-image. I grew up being fairly tall and lanky. I had a fast metabolism, lived an active lifestyle and quickly learned in the change room for middle school gym class that not everybody could eat as much as they wanted and not worry about gaining extra weight like I could.
As strange as it may sound, I became self conscious about this fact. While most girls were pinching their tummy and complaining about it not being as flat as they wanted, or wearing cap sleeved shirts to hide their arms, I so desired to be like what I thought was "everyone else" that I found myself wishing that I too had just a little extra around my belly. I didn't want to be pointed out as the skinny girl.
Even in health class when we talked about the BMI and I was on the lower side, I felt like I wanted to tell everyone "Hey! I don't have an eating disorder! I sometimes even eat more than my older brothers! I just can't help being thin!"
This led me to doing push ups often before bed to try to get my limbs to not look so noodle-y and shying away from skinny jeans when they first became popular to hide how thin I was.
You see, it seems to me that everyone can have a reason to complain about themselves. Too skinny, or too big. Too tall or too short. Too average or too abnormal. These thoughts can affect the way we live our lives. They leave us more concerned about ourselves than about others. It's easy to try to fit into our friends' conversations and complain about ourselves right along with the next person, but what if we all just decided to love who we are right now?
Learning to love oneself despite all the "imperfections" they might see can seem daunting, but it can be so amazing. It takes real discipline of the mind and tongue, but pray and ask for God's help!
Something powerful to do is look in the mirror and speak words of love and life to your body. The Bible says that the power of life and death is in the tongue, so chose to speak life about yourself! You'll have all of heaven backing you up with a resounding "AMEN SISTER!" Look at your face, say "I love my nose. Thank you nose for doing such a great job, especially when you smelled cookies today. I love my skin. Thank you skin for holding keeping all my insides...inside!" Look at the rest of your body, see the beauty that God has created! It's there. It's really there. Praise God for what he has made, YOU ARE altogether beautiful!! And so am I! Lots of these thoughts have stemmed from this video from Bethel's Heaven Come Conference of Abi Stumvoll speaking. I encourage you to listen to it! Even if it is just a little bit each morning as you are getting ready, she has got great things to say! https://youtu.be/23NEct-zmvs