Home is where you feel most alive, part 6

I'VE BEEN REMINDED that loving is really just about sharing life together.

And as the ladies in my small group reminded me again on Thursday, there is so much we all have to learn from each other, and to be in an environment where women are alive and thriving, flourishing, being real with the crap in their lives yet just as real with how they are fighting to believe truth and trust and believe God and who He says He is, and who we are as a result, is just refreshing. Life-giving.

We all have something to say. Something to share. Something of value and of worth.

I look around the room and just hearing all the stories of everyone's week and seeing the hand of God in each of our situations and daily battles, however ordinary and mundane, just encouraged my heart so much.

We are all beautiful.

I just wanted to tell them all.

The last couple weeks in conversations with the college women in our campus church or the women of all ages at Woodcrest, I have been struck, once again by their beauty.

You are beautiful, girl. No, listen to me... you are BEAUTIFUL.

I told one of our 19-year-old girls that this week and wouldn't let her continue her self-abasement as I listened to her and wanted to hear her, as all the lengths she is going to, to be loved, are coming up dry. Leaving her more empty and feeling less alone. Feeling like less of a person. And rejected. Through all she shared, I could see a heart desperately wanting to know she is wanted. Has value. Has worth. Life and unfortunately, people have lied to her for far too long. I couldn't take it anymore.

I needed her to hear the truth and hear it loud and clear. I will never forget the look in her eyes. As she stared at me with tears and her eyes.

No one had every told her that before. I knew the feeling all to well, as the Enemy had used people and life to assuage the same assault on me as well.

She needed to know she mattered. And that she was enough. Just the way she was.

It has hit me so many times, as I see no difference in the 46-year-old or the 19-year-old, we are ALL beautiful and we need to know it. Not just outwardly, but that we carry within us the gift of the feminine soul, as Jonalyn Grace Fincher says, that we were created in the image of God, and within women, there are qualities of the invisible God that are made visible, in some of the most brilliant and beautiful ways.

We are all beautiful.

Like I said, I was struck again on Thursday.

I thought to myself, I am sitting here, SURROUNDED by beautiful women. Women who are confident. Women who are bold and not afraid to tell you what they think, women who make me want to be a better woman. Women who make me realize that I am already enough.

That I matter. That I bring something to the table. That I mean something to the place. Not that we gain our value from how much we mean to the place, but to acknowledge that it does matter when we're there, because WE matter. And that it is different when I am not there, just as it is when any of them is not there, because there is something He has created me to be and that He has created us to do, that is unique from anyone else.

That, as one of our challenges has been from early in the semester, that it would be a “no comparison” zone... instead of sizing one another up and seeing who falls where, we can CELEBRATE and call forth one another's beauty, soul, heart and passions...

*Photo with two of my beloved Amandas, Amanda Bell and Amanda Schomaker, (Our church literally has like 16), at a Rock women's dinner last year

to be continued...