Out of the blue thoughts

Sometimes I wish I could sit down and have a talk with teenagers-- particularly girls. Facebook gives you quite a bit of insight into these young girls' thoughts, actions, and entire mindset. I find it unsettling. And yet in so many ways I was so much like these girls when I was younger. Maybe not to quite the extent of some of them with alcohol or boys, but I have little doubt that had I been presented with these issues more I might easily have fallen into it. It just saddens me to see so many of them striving to be something they aren't.

I wish that when I was sixteen I could have realized that so many of my problems were truly trivial. I wish I had known that being skinny was not the most important thing. I would have saved myself so much agony had I not let that become such a focus. In the end it has hurt me more in the long run than if I would have accepted myself for the way I was. I wish I had learned who my true friends were early on, to save myself the heartache of losing them. And although I never dated in high school, I do wish I had not spent so much time striving to be noticed. Honestly, most of these are issues I still struggle with to some degree. I can see that they took root when I was in high school, and uprooting them has been one of the most difficult and seemingly impossible tasks ever.

I think that for women particularly it is so difficult to live in today's world. I'm not trying to downplay the struggles that men have. I'll be the first to say I don't know what men go through on a day-to-day basis. But in our society, women must be everything. We must be smart, we must be beautiful, we must be independent and successful, we must be size 4, we must have 36 DD cup size, we must have a man at our side, we must be Super Mom, we must... we must... we must..... just check out commercials on TV or ads in magazines!! And on top of all of these expectations, we long to simply be noticed, loved, and accepted. It's no wonder so many struggle with insecurities, anorexia/bulimia, depression, drug addictions, and the list could go on.

Looking back on my sixteen-year-old self (or even my eighteen or twenty-year-old self) I see a very different person than who I am now. It's not that I find my personality changed, or that I've become someone I'm not. In some ways I find good, positive changes in that I have grown up and, I believe, matured a lot. But I find myself to have hardened over the years. Walls have been built. My bright expectations for life were not met in the ways I had dreamed (and yet there is so much time for that-- why can't I understand that?!). I suppose this is something that every woman comes to realize in her life. In the end I think that most of us struggle with all of these issues, and they never really go away. In fact, I think it is a very normal part of life and part of growing up, but I wish it didn't have to be that way. I wish I could go back and tell myself all of these things-- to not worry about my looks, my size, about my social status, or about boys, etc... because these things eat away at you, never letting up.

The awesome thing is that God is not done growing me yet. This is not the finished product, and am I ever grateful for that! "...He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus" (Philippians 1:6). Someday we will no longer struggle. Our expectations for eternity will be met beyond what we could ever imagine. I suppose this doesn't always connect from my head to my heart, because I continue to struggle. But I just wish I could get beyond the insecurities, the past hurts, and my shortcomings to truly understand where I stand in Christ. But, I think, it won't be until the day of Christ Jesus that all of this is really gone.