Strippers
Living in a foreign country with no family and a limited number of local friends that have been so for longer than a year, you come to depend on what I, personally believe, may be the single best invention in the last ten years: Skype, FaceTime, Zoom, and the other group conference apps that have changed life as we know it. I jump on a call once or twice a week with a regular rotating group of long-standing friends (and one or two individual calls…what can I say? I’m a talker) to keep up, stay connected, and consistently refresh & revitalize my spirit.
I had scheduled one such call with a couple of my Unfiltereds (see my ‘Sooo You’re Back…?’ post from Feb 8, 2019 if you don’t know what that is) a couple weeks ago one early Saturday morning and rolled out of bed to jump on our chat. I had been toying with a few ideas to engage more with you guys – my fellow GLOWers – and had been thinking of and talking about doing a morning vid chat; something informal, comfortable, and intimate and packed with heart, wisdom and truth.
I wanted a place where women could show up in their jammies with their first cup of coffee or be in some stage of the first part of their day and not feel like they had to be all put together just to be there. One of the UBs jumped on and, as we began discussing it, I got more amped and said we should do a trial run right then – bad hair, bad breath and all. UB #1 agreed and BOOP! I hit the record button.
UB #2 jumped on a few minutes later having just rolled out of bed herself and, upon discovering that we were recording for possible publishing in the state we were all in (after the full 3-minute s***talking session she started immediately upon joining the call lol!), she first soundly cussed us out, rebuked us both for daring to think of publishing anything looking the way we did, and went into a white-hot shaming of how unforgiving the internet, social media, etc. was and how images last forever. She SHUT. THAT. DOWN. And then she hung up on us.
I wanted her to be wrong. I really did. But I knew she wasn’t…
I can’t lie. I felt all of it and the sting that remained had me fighting in my mind and spirit for the rest of the day. I wanted her to be wrong. I really did. But I knew she wasn’t. The problem was that, with the new video series I was about to release, if bad hair and bad breath was an issue, some of the intimate details of my life that I’d shared in those videos – details I’d ONLY share because I knew they would help someone – yeah…those were really going to be an issue.
I started going through the videos again trying to see how I could cut out potentially-embarrassing parts and keep the narrative that I knew needed to be told for any of it to make sense. I was spooked. It was as if I was suddenly aware that I was naked and exposed but nothing had changed except that someone had told me I was.
I was trying to cover myself but I had learned from the start of my tenure as a pastor and women’s leader back in 2001 that you cannot invite other people to be naked and vulnerable and not be so yourself. I had learned that for any true healing to occur and for God to move the way He wants to, transparency in a safe space – free from judgment and enshrouded in the love, acceptance and wisdom of God – was a non-negotiable must. The problem I was now trying to negotiate was at fundamental odds with who I was and I was at a crossroads. Bottom line: You can’t cover up AND be bold, free, and know you’re loved by God at the same time.
The essence of our society these days demands that we look like we have it all together. Even as we decry the fakeness of most of what we see and scold one another to be authentic and not to buy into believing (from the images we consume) that everyone’s life is perfect except our own, we still do it. We still post the curated selfies and the frantic videos that make it look like we’re having the time of our lives all the time, and the deep, afar-off-looking travel photos, and all the rest of it. And by doing so, we tacitly put ourselves at war with ourselves.
We want to be real. We really do.
But we’re afraid.
Because we also want to be accepted.
And in our heart of hearts, we’re not sure we will be if we show the real.
The truth is we like pretty packages. If we had a choice between our soon-to-be-new-favorite blouse wrapped in a brown paper bag and that same blouse wrapped in an origami-infused creation, most of us would choose the latter. Why? Because we like pretty packages.
Advertisers know this. So do all the producers who cast our favorite movies and shows. So do a variety of other people in a variety of other industries and professions. They know, agree and repeat that natural is good as long as it’s not too natural and authentic is good as long as it’s not too authentic. And we convince ourselves and others of that same message day after day and post after post.
So back to my dilemma. I hadn’t crawled out of the most excruciating pain of my life – resurrected from the proverbial dead, if you will, for more than four years – just to come back to the land of the living and be punked out. If what I’d already experienced hadn’t killed me, this certainly wasn’t going to be the bullet that did the job.
If I had learned nothing else over the last several years (and I had learned PLENTY let me tell you), I learned that God will have your back and cover your ass no matter what. Yeah I said it! Aaaand I had learned that my most debilitating weaknesses in my own eyes were the perfect opportunities for God to show up and BE strength for me.
From financial scares to personal attacks to health challenges on down the list, I had learned to lean in and ask God to help and He’d done so. He’d put things back together and then patched me up so good that I forgot the whole thing until I came across the faded scar every once in a while that told me an injury had once occurred there.
I got on a video conference a few days ago with some friends and spent some time moving in the spirit with them. Without any knowledge of the matter I had been chewing on, one of my friends said something that hit the nail on the head:
“I feel like God is saying that we are beautiful and sexy and desirable to Him just the way we are – naked and not trying to be anything other than who and what we are – and that anything else we do or put on top of that is fine but that He really just likes the stripped down version.”
BOOM!
After this and the diving I’d done to retrieve truth from my own underwater storage, I emerged reminded of my 100% acceptance BECAUSE of God’s love for me (and all of us) and inclusive of all the ugly things remembered and forgotten over the course of my life. I resolved that UB #2’s advice was sound within a measure but that the dividing line was on the other side of fear.
Yes, I’d brush my hair and teeth because man looks at the outer parts and too much nakedness scares some people. LOL! But at the same time, I’d know and always remember that God looks at the inner parts and it is there that I and all of us are loved and accepted without all of that – unmade-up, smelly, and somewhat unattractive – and declared COVERED.