Loveliness.. To loath or just smile and go Okay!

Okay. Time to get real here. Reading some more articles tonight and the statistics that they stated kind of just bothered me. It was refereeing to body images in teen girls and so on. How something like 78% by the age of 17 try to alter their image or dislike their bodies. WHAT IN THE WORLD!!!! Now is that statistic accurate I have no clue. If it is man, that is just awful. 17 years old. All they should worry about is school and college, and yes I guess even boys. Looking back at me at age 17 I have to honestly say I didn’t like my body as much as I should of. I was a size 2. 2! I might be able to get my arm into a size 2 pair of pants now but that is about it. GOOD grief what was I thinking. I had no physical issues other than the cursed acne which I still have at 30. Thanks Mom love the genetics on that one! I had a tiny waist a cute little rear end and figure. I didn’t have to work hard at it and could eat whatever and it didn’t matter. Now was I the most popular of girls. HA Nope. Did guys line up at my door to date me, NOPE on that as well. But in the grand scheme of things I can’t for the life of me figure out why at 17 I didn’t like my body image. Fast forward. 30! Gasp! This is where I will get real and well completely embarrass myself but hey what the heck. 2014 is a new year and a year of change so here we go. I love the saying beauty is on the inside not the outside but loving the saying and believing in it is not the same thing. Would I like to be blessed to be a slender and honestly natural beauty at 30 of course I would. But wait a minute maybe my idea of that very statement is what is wrong with me. So let’s break this down. Do I still have the acne, well of course I do thanks to lovely genetics. Hair lots of so that is a blessing itself even though I tend to leave strands of it anywhere I go. Eyes I’ve always liked my eyes I thought they were different even though they are blue and blue is not an uncommon color at all. So here we go the big one my body! GASP! Yes I am going there. I will say at 30 I have a whole lot more loveliness than I did at 17. My size 2 former teen self has morphed into this Mommy body that shows it. I have lost weight and inches and so on over the past couple of years and kept them off so Yay for me on that but I haven’t lost the self-loathing. I can honestly say when I wake up and look in the mirror at my God given loveliness right now I don’t like it. I have not liked my body image well since my first baby was born. My beautiful and unquie baby girl. All whooping 9 almost 10 pounds of her. Does my body show the price I paid to carry her and keep her safe for those 8ish months? Absolutely it does. Well over 65 plus pound gained with her. As I stand there in the mirror I need to be better at reminding myself to look at the stretch marks that were left behind and remember that those were given to me by grace and are beautiful because of what reward I got from them. Do I do that, NOPE. I see them as ugly and annoying and unattractive. When my daughter sees my stomach and goes oh that is from me and smiles and walks off, why can’t I do that? She doesn’t see it as ugly or horrible. She sees it as a reminder of her and smiles. If I truly want to be a beauty on the outside I need to start on the inside. I don’t mean I’m going to start doing strenuous exercises and all of that. Ha!  I mean I need to remind myself every day I look in the mirror to remember about my baby girl and go “Okay” shrug my shoulders and walk off with a smile. Do I wear a size 2, HA not even an 8. I still am in a size 12/14. Granted the size 14 I love when I first put on because they are relaxed fit but by lunch I have to hold them up because they keep falling down. So yeah maybe I need to buy a smaller size but the mind just won’t let me. If I buy a 12 possibly even an 11 I’d be excited when I leave the store. BUT once I got home and put them on and they would be tight and I would see that lovely pooch over the top and I’d stop loving them as much. So I need to focus more on the mind instead of the numbers. Now granted I do have some pants that are not jeans that say M 8/10 and BOY DO I LOVE THOSE Pants!!!!  If I could get away with it I would wear them every day if I could. So…. Change my mind change my heart and change my body. If I want true beauty and I don’t mean the world’s version of true beauty then I need to make it start from my heart and love myself first. My husband and my kids all love me even with all the extra loveliness so why can’t I? ??????? So my new hope for this year is just to remember to smile and be okay with me.

1 year 1 baby step closer.

As always: I am horrible at spelling and grammar so ignore that. Growth is a process and most times it seems very hard, very long, very scary and very stressful. But God intends for us to grow daily. So he sends us what we need to make sure we seek him that day so we can grow. Today has been a struggle for me for various reasons. I struggle with a lot of things. With being a good mom, with putting my kids first before anything else when and when I shouldn’t, with being a good wife, being a submissive wife, not controlling everything, being a good teacher to the kids, being a good friend and being a good daughter of Christ. Boy how I fail on all of those accounts daily. I am stubborn, strong willed, pig headed and downright determined most times. Which almost all of these traits tend to not let God take the lead and usually cause me to have to stumble or fall before I will let him take the rains in my life. It is not a onetime struggle for me it is a daily struggle sometimes even more than that. I sat down tonight and read the bible with my daughter and we read one of the few verses I can actually remember from memory. Which is not good itself. Then I realized oh bad Rachel that is the first time I have ever sat down with her and actually opened my bible and read with her and discussed what we read. We discuss God and things of that he has done often but never have I opened that bible in front of her and read. What am I doing. Why have I not done that before. How can I raise my daughter and her not see that. So I asked her tonight to help remind Mommy when she forgets that we need to read. She is very good about reminding me if I forget to give her their nightly vitamins so I’m hoping she will remind me of this as well. I read a blurb the other day that said that God does give us more than we can handle so we will seek him. Now I don’t remember the exact wording and really do not wish to have to try to find it again but this has made me think. I use to believe that God never gave us more than we could handle. But that blurb has stuck with me. If God only gave us what he knows we could handle then when would we seek him. Shoot if I could actually handle half the stuff that my day entails by myself I’d probably never even say his name. Horrible to thank but honest. I signed into my blog which apparently it has been a very long time. Not any real reason why I haven’t signed in lately just haven’t. I decided to re-read some of my post. I made it through the last post I wrote and had to stop. I couldn’t go any further. Just reading that post back from February of 2013 after the ladies retreat I went to. Man I am awful. Reading that put me back in my place and reminded me tonight alone that I am not where I need to be with my walk with God. That it has taken certain steps yesterday and even today alone to get me to seek him and ask for his help. God did not create me to do things myself. Even though I think so most of the time. If it was not for all kinds of people I couldn’t be who or where I am today. I am flawed and broken and a sinner. That I don’t think will ever change. The only thing I can change is to try my best every day to seek him first. To grab onto him first thing every day and be grateful. For I have a lot to be grateful for. I have a husband and two amazing kids who I love them all very dearly. I have parents who have given the better part of their life to raise and protect me, and still are. Just thinking of what they have gone through just to make sure I stayed alive and healthy I couldn’t imagine. I have friends who even though we are in different places in our lives and maybe even in down locations I will always be grateful for them and love them dearly. I have a job that I love and I learn from each day. I learn more from my co-workers and students then what I probably even teach. But when I can sit there and hear my baby girl ask questions about what we read and her give me an answer of a pure heart. It makes me smile. I do believe that God has blessed me with my children not only for me to care and protect here on Earth but for me to learn from. For I learn far more from them. I have found myself in situations all the time when she will ask me questions I cannot honestly answer because I don’t know. So I know I have to find out because she will ask me again and will expect an answer. So at least in my life my kids are kind of a check and balance. Because boy do they check up on their mom and make sure she does what she says. There are times I have my moments where I could just escape for a bit. But regardless of where or who I am with my heart and mind is always at home with my family. I may seem to have a routine life of husband, kids, work, cleaning, and so on but I have to remember that each and every one of those things is a blessing that has been in trusted to me to protect and nurture and to grow from. As I re-read my blog tonight this one segment stood out the most. Mainly because I still struggle with it even today, but I can say that in the past year I have worked on it. I have. I do not have it mastered or no where near figured out but I have taken baby steps to try my best to do this. For example, the Bible says a women is to submit to her husband. I have always been defensive to this statement and verse. Every time I heard this I would go into shutdown mode and be like NO WAY. That is because I never truly understood it and was too afraid to ask any one because I was afraid I would look stupid. One lady put it this way to me tonight and I truly got it…She explained that submission can also be to submit yourself low enough so that God can reach your husband. That as women we try to fix our husbands ourselves and the only one who can is God. So that we need to submit ourselves low enough (get out of God’s way) so he can reach our husbands. So looking back since then I can with my head held high say I have grown. That I am one step maybe just that one baby step closer to where I should be. So with that I want to leave you with this question…….. Are you one step closer to God?