My stomach churned, and I cringed as we parked the car. Never before had I felt this scared to enter a high school. For my education major, I had to go to a high school three times a week to observe an English teacher.
“I don’t want to get out,” I murmured to my fellow college classmate, who smiled and said it’d be okay. I nodded and stepped out of the car, but wished more than anything I had a brown paper bag to put over my head. My hands were sweating and my heart was beating through my dress shirt. As I walked up to the high school my worst fear laughed cruelly in my face.
“Look at her!” a high school boy pointed at me. My eyes ventured from his brutality as I entered the building for safety. The hallways were not any less scary; I practically ran to my classroom. What a nightmare, I was thinking until another teacher came into the room.
“Did you donate your hair?” she was the first one to smile at me.
“Yes!” I said so eagerly I practically spit it out. Finally, I had a reason to tell people why I looked the way I did. I had shaved my head the day before during our campus’ St. Baldrick’s program to raise money for the cancer foundation. When they first buzzed off my hair, I had so much support that it didn’t even faze me…until later that night. When I was alone in my room, I started balling…I mean really balling. I’m not much of crier, so I probably shed more tears in that moment than the entire year.
I have always struggled with self-image and beauty, but as my identity started becoming more engraved in Christ it got easier…until my hair was gone. When I lost my hair, I felt like I lost any beauty that was left in me; I felt like I lost my identity. I felt utterly ugly. But it was the most humbling experience of my life, and God used it to strip me of the world’s standard of beauty and show me that His definition is all that matters. 1 Peter 3:3-4 became a clutch verse for me. I finally understood what true beauty is and found my identity in the Lord.
Because I have struggled with it my entire life, it has become my passion in reaching out to young women. I desire for every girl to know true beauty, to be release from the media’s captive messages of what beauty looks like, to know that she has an unfading, unique beauty, and to know that she is loved beyond measure by the Maker of beauty Himself. I believe every woman deserves to know she possesses a captivating, unfading beauty in the Lord. “You’re beautiful…it’s true!” =D
Before the cut After the buzz
