Growing Strong Daughters by Lisa Graham McMinn

Author:Lisa Graham McMinn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2000-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

PHYSICAL ESSENCE

I have never worked with a beautiful young woman who thought she was beautiful or thin enough.

Joel Schumacher, movie director, after working with

Demi Moore, Julia Roberts, and Sandra Bullock 1

Women have been made in the image of God, and while our focus is usually on the character traits we have that reflect God’s image, God encased that image in physical human bodies. We are knit together in our mothers’ wombs by the hand of God. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. However much Scripture affirms our physical selves, few women feel that they have been wonderfully made—even women who other women want to look like, such as Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock. Rather than celebrate the diversity God created in our differences, we accept some standard we call beautiful and compare ourselves mercilessly to that standard. We try to hide our thick thighs and mask our pronounced chins or close-set eyes, because we know the value of female bodies in our culture is based primarily on external beauty.

A better way to value our bodies is as vessels for our souls. Our body is the window through which our soul experiences such pleasures as the taste of chocolate, the scent of lilacs, the sound of a bird’s song, the spectacle of a sunset, the intimacy of sexual ecstasy. A body that functions well can climb mountains, swim, run, even carry a backpack eight or nine miles a day while exploring the wonders of the wilderness.

Over the span of a decade, Jana (my friend and backpacking partner) and I took several groups of women to Isle Royale, a small island in Lake Superior. For a week we helped women experience their bodies as windows to their souls. All of us were moved by the mysterious and eerie cry of loons, which are only found in pristine, secluded areas. We saw moose, all kinds of birds, ducks, yellow lady slippers, and wild blue iris as we walked along trails where the ferns came up to our waists. For the few willing to drag themselves from their warm sleeping bags at night out onto a cold dock or into a clearing, we saw more stars than we ever imagined. We grew to appreciate the strength in legs that carried us and our packs mile after mile along ridge and coastal trails. Our expeditions were called “Glorious Endurance,” and they were. At some points, the trip felt only like an endurance, but by the end of the week, all would say it was indeed a glorious endurance. Our embodied souls experienced God at Isle Royale.

Our bodies also allow us to serve God. With our voices we praise God and bring the good news of Jesus to those without hope. We feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, dress the naked, care for the sick, and visit the prisoner (Matthew 25). Mother Teresa used her body to serve others, earning the nickname “The saint of the gutters.”2 At age thirty-six, she left the cloister in Calcutta (where she taught rich girls) to work among lepers, the most reviled of India’s poor.

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