2015 - a new year - may have many of us consumed with new workout plans, new diet plans, pills, skin creams, hair styles and more, intended to make ourselves look better, younger, "hotter"...
This Ministry for women...this blog..."Beautifully Broken" is all about how God uses our flaws, our baggage, our stumbles and falls, the scars that are left, etc to reveal His beauty, His grace, His glory to AND through us. :)
Everyone has their own idea of what external beauty looks like - thus the phrase "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". But let's explore the kind of beauty that is FAR less subjective.
Over the next few days/weeks - I'm going to look at what the bible says about Beauty. I'm going to share my findings believing that we could ALL could use a reminder of this - because the message we get day in and day out in our culture, is VASTLY different from what the Bible tells us - and from what God wants us to remember.
When talking about external beauty, there are a number of features & attributes people might recognize as beautiful: long hair, pronounced cheek bones, full lips, bright eyes, big smile etc. Just the same, there are a number of attributes in the bible that God tells us are beautiful. So let's look at those and focus on those which have NOTHING to do with our DNA...:)
Because of all the hype about exercise, weight loss, and diet at the beginning of the new year, let's start there shall we?! :) (and maybe also because I'm a fitness instructor...)
- 1 Corinthians 6:19: "Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who live sin you and was given to you by God. You do not belong to yourself for God bought you with a high price. So you must honor God with your body."
- Proverbs 31:17: "She girds herself with strength for her God-given task and makes her arms strong and firm."
- 1 Timothy 4:8: "Physical training is good, but training for godliness is much better, promising benefits in this life and in the life to come."
- This same verse from The Message reads: "Exercise daily in God--no spiritual flabbiness, please! Workouts in the gymnasium are useful, but a disciplined life in God is far more so, making you fit both today and forever.
Is taking care of our bodies and maintaining or striving for a healthy level of fitness good, YES! And it's important. If our bodies are God's temple, God's home...then we ought to treat them with respect. What does that look like? It means we take care of our heart, lungs, circulatory system etc. with cardiovascular activity. It means that we keep our skeletal system strong with weights or resistance training. Neither of these require a gym membership although that obligation may be what some need to remain accountable! But staying healthy has NUMEROUS benefits in our lives. In my own life, physical fitness and regular exercise helped me get off and help me stay off anti-depressants. I need the stress and anxiety relief that exercise offers and I need the endorphins after a workout that boost my mood! :) Being healthy and fit makes it possible for us to serve a friend or congregation member when they need help moving and packing the moving van, it helps us keep up with our children (it even helps with pregnancy, labor, and post-partom), it certainly doesn't HINDER our relationship with our husband in the bedroom... (wink, wink). Did you know that research cites exercise as the primary prevention for 35 chronic diseases! Everything from stroke and hypertension to osteoarthritis and depression.
Simply put...a healthy and fit women who takes care of her temple is a beautiful women, but her exercise efforts and goals should be shadowed by her pursuit of Christ.
More than anything, a Christian women who is fit and healthy is beautiful to me because it represents a life of balance (assuming her focus on fitness and health is a balanced, healthy one). It means she honors the body God gave her, she desires to honor her husband by maintaining a healthy size/shape (which is NOT a 0 or a 2 for ALL of us - so don't take that out of context!), she desires to set a good example for her children and have the energy to enjoy them and the things they like to do, it may even mean that she desires to set a good example for the young women in her sphere who need to see that healthy and fit does NOT always look like the magazine covers would have us believe.
Now a couple points I must also make...women who have a health condition that makes exercise hard, this post is not intended to make you feel discouraged or inadequate, and I'm also not saying if you exercise, you'll NEVER have any health problems or challenges in life...because we all know and acknowledge that things are NOT perfect on this side of heaven. I recently met my own bout of discouragement this fall after a double knee surgery (my 6th one in total). I went into the surgery thinking the Dr. would fix my knee pain and I'd be ready to run another half marathon this spring...but came out of the surgery hearing from him that some things were fixed, but that the knee pain I've been feeling is permanent. There is damage to my knees that is beyond repair and that long distance running isn't a realistic option for me anymore. It was VERY hard to hear, but it doesn't mean I can't be fit and healthy. It means only that I can't run half marathons, or 10ks for that matter. But I CAN swim, I CAN walk, I CAN use an elliptical, I CAN have fun with dance cardio in classes like Zumba, I CAN lift weights...there are many things I CAN do and so I will focus on what I CAN do...and let go of what I can't.
Lastly I want to leave you with the last verse I shared 1 Timothy 4:8, while exercise is good and important - it DOES not trump the importance of God's word, spending time in it, and clinging to it, in fact it pales in comparison. Our focus on fitness and healthy should never be higher on our priority list than pursuing Christ. On another day, in a different post I can share about my struggles with over exercising and under eating in my floundering attempt to "control" things in my life and to "work away" the pain that I had experienced. I see MANY women strive for goals that are both unrealistic and unattainable...or maybe attainable but nearly impossible to MAINTAIN - that is NOT the kind of balance I'm speaking of. That level of obsessing is NOT the attribute of beauty that the bible steers us towards.
Do you have a healthy woman as an example in your life? Did you learn this from your own mother or are you trying to set a different example for your own children?
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