mess.

I just read over the first post on this blog.

I talked about inner beauty and loving yourself as God created you. What a conviction.

To be completely honest, I feel a bit hypocritical right now. Lately I have been so down on myself in so many areas - I don't look right. I work too hard. I don't work hard enough. I don't study enough. I study too much. I'll never get an A in that class. I don't show Jesus enough love. I don't give enough of myself to my friends. The self-deprecation goes on and on.

I don't think I'm alone in these feelings, though.

What woman doesn't think she's not good enough at some time or another? I don't look like Jennifer Aniston so I must be ugly. I'll never be as successful as my male coworkers so why even put forth effort? I'm not as spiritual as Beth Moore so Jesus must not love me.

Pack. Of. Lies.

Lies that are constantly fed to us by the enemy through the media, teachers, bosses, friends, family - anyone and everyone who has some kind of influence in our lives.

Why do we feel like we have to look like a celebrity to be pretty? Their job is to be the essence of the world's perception of beauty. So they work out three hours a day, seven days a week, and never eat meat.

I don't know about you, but I can't handle that lifestyle. I have neither the time nor the desire.

Why do I feel like God can't possibly love me because I've messed up His masterpiece so much? This is a thought that plagues me.

I know He loves me. No matter what. His love is unconditional. I've even blogged about it.

Shauna Niequist (again, that fabulous and insightful woman that I would love to meet) talks about such feelings in "Cold Tangerines." She mentions how she and her husband have always lived in new houses, but she's always felt like an old house kind of person. So they get an old house. It has no bells and whistles but is full of bumps and bruises.

She loves their old house and they constantly work to fix it up. One day she visits a friend in her new home and is overcome with jealousy. She's jealous that her friend doesn't have leaky toilets or an infestation. And suddenly she wants a house that's shiny and new.

She realizes that this is a mirror representation of her life.

"On my worst days, I start to believe that what God wants is perfection. That God is a new-house God. That everything has to work just right, with no cracks in the plaster and no loose tiles. That I need to be completely fixed up. . . . On my very best days, as an act of solidarity with my house, since we're both kind of odd, mismatched, screwed-up things, I practice letting it be an old not-fixed-up house, while I practice being a not-fixed-up person. I wear my ugly pants, the saggy yellow terry-cloth ones with the permanently dirty hems, and I walk around my house, looking at all the things that I should fix someday, but I dont' fix them just yet, and I imagine God noticing all the things about me that should get fixed up one day, and loving me anyway and being okay with the mess for the time being."

So, love yourself. Even on your worst days. We all have terrible days when we somehow gained 20 pounds overnight, the humidity makes our hair look like we're headed to the Class of '85 prom, we can't think at school and can't do anything right at work.

Those days happen. Much more often than is comfortable.

Get used to them.

Embrace them.

Embrace you.

Love you.

Just as God loves you . . . even if you are a mess.

"Cause you're amazing. Just the way you are."
-Bruno Mars