Broken Perception

Many of us walk through our lives with false perceptions of who we are and who we are meant to be. The messages that we receive in childhood combined with the noisy society we live in erode our sense of reality and hold up a false mirror to us making it nearly impossible for us to perceive ourselves correctly. This false perception can take a variety of forms but for a lot of women it manifests in their inability to see their own beauty.

Almost my entire life I thought I was ugly. My perception of myself was wounded because I was comparing myself to a standard of beauty that I was not created to meet. My sister, who is almost two years younger than me, was always the slim, athletic, blond-haired, blue-eyed, all American beauty. She was the classic, the ideal that I fell short of by comparison. This wasn’t just my standard, it was the standard of the small town, rural, middle America I grew up in. All the popular, pretty girls followed this pattern.

When I was in ninth grade, my sister was in seventh and was on sports teams with all the most popular girls in my grade. When they made the connection between us, invariably their response was the same, “Darci is your sister?? She is so pretty! You don’t look a thing alike.” This was said in a tone that left no doubt about the unspoken, underlying message regarding my own appearance.  My sister is beautiful, and we don’t look a thing alike. We don’t look anything alike because I was adopted and therefore we don’t have the familial similarities common for siblings.

She was created to manifest beauty in a particular way to the world, a way that was always easy for me to perceive. What took my much longer to perceive was the reality that I too was created to manifest beauty to the world in a particular way. My fair complexion and high contrast, dark, wavy locks and deep brown eyers were never meant to be compared to her sleek blond tresses and bright blue eyes. Her thin, strong, athletic body was lovingly designed by the Creator who never tires of revealing His glory in the world and so was my strong body with its feminine curves.

I have written before about the reality that women manifest God’s beauty in the world. He created us to be like a terrestrial paradise filled with flowers of every variety. Delicate little forget-me-nots mixed in with round, robust roses, vivid tiger lilies, and towering sunflowers, among a myriad of others. Roses do not need the height of a sunflower to be beautiful nor do pansies lack for beauty by not sharing the vivaciousness of the lily. Each excels in beauty as it is what it was meant to be.

Maybe you see yourself more as a weed than a flower. Keep in mind then that what we have defined as weeds are simply flowers that spread rapidly and bloom in places they were not planted. They are full of life and show up in ways society did not intend and that is incredibly beautiful.

Please do not hold yourself to the standard of a society that does not care about you. You have a God who loves you and delights in you; see yourself as you are in his gaze. The perception of the world is as broken and erroneous as mine used to be; the lens it uses is false. Take on instead the lens of God who sees clearly in the light of truth. Embrace who you were created to be and know that in doing so the truth of your beauty shines forth full of glory and splendor.