For the ladies

I think I've been feeling particularly self-conscious lately. It's funny because as a Christian woman I feel like it's something I should just make go away- there's really no place for self-centred meditation in a humble heart-but in terms of 'making it go away' I'm not doing a very good job. It doesn't seem to matter how often (or not) I look in a mirror or how deliberately I distract my thoughts (foolishly prayer is not always my first defence!) walking through the city to uni, or driving to work or logging in to facebook only seems to highlight how all around me are pictures of beautiful, perfect, charismatic, funny, confident women and it's just intimadating. Instead of encouraging individuality the world around me seems to be promoting perfection-something I neither long nor strive for.
What to strive for though? I don't find my beauty in my outward appearance, in fact I consider it somwehat a blessing I'm not ridiculously good looking-what a can of worms that opens for women who want to reflect God's impressive design- but I don't really have a firm picture of what it is I am longing for. Instead I opt for the cheap alternative-the desire to disappear into the crowd of ordinary women who in their everyday don't search for change or difference or orginality but rather to keep up with the proverbial Jones's. Even the Jones's were more original then that.
A gentle and quiet spirit I think. That's biblical, let's run the idea.Barbara Hughes is the gun when it comes to this, her passage on this in Disciplines of a Godly Woman is the best description I've come across-

Gentleness, or meekness as many translations have it, isn't a weakness or spinelessness or timidity or even niceness. This word in classical Greek was used to describe tame animals, soothing medicine, a mild word and a mild breeze. It is a word with caress in it.
Gentleness also implies self-control. Aristotle said that gentleness is the mean between excessive anger and excessive angerlessness. So the person who is gentle is able to balance his anger. He controls it. Meekness/gentleness is strength under control. (pg 153)

An awesome exegesis, and on some levels a great answer to the question of what I should be striving for. On the other hand it is difficult to use it as an answer to the unfufillment felt when your reflection doesn't reflect the way you want it to. If a friend told me she felt that she looked ugly it would be difficult for me to justify how controlling your anger makes you beautiful. Perhaps that's a flaw in the society I work in, or the way I think, perhaps the way I WOULD respond is unbiblical. I'm very willing to be wrong.
Perhaps though there are two ways to break this chain of thought. I can't pretend it'll go away by a stream of pathetic distractions, that will probably only heighten my issue by refraining to agknowledging it as important.
1) Meditating on how beautiful GOD is. I love reading Job 38, Genesis 2 and Ps 33 for this. How impressive God's creation and sovereignty is! We are the pinnacle of God's creation, warts, pimples, bad hair days, overweight, underweight, foul-speaking, foul-smelling and all. He delights in us. He thinks we're beautiful. He creates great natural beauty, oceans and mountains and sunrises and rainforests and he prizes US because beauty reaches it's pinnacle in RELATIONSHIP. Look at Jesus' s prayer for his disciples in John 17. So beautiful, not because it contains rhetoric, symmetrical phrasing or other intelligent techniques but because it is heartfelt. A sunset is beautiful, but a friend is more so. A clear night sky is beautiful but more so is a bride. We make manifest God's beauty.
2) By actually nutting out what makes me ugly and beautiful on the inside. Sure my hair looks feral but my thoughts are worse. Sure my dress is mishapen but my lack of prayer is far more abhorrent to the sight of God. Ask for forgiveness-not to be beautiful for yourself before God but that God might be seen as more beautiful by others. That is, after all, what we are all about.
What should I strive for? God's beauty. And if he uses me to portray even a glimpse of that how blessed am I.

When to ask?

I'm sorry to harp on about my sunday school girls again but one of them (Lauren) this week in prayer thanked God that we could believe in Him and that we might go on beliving him (after telling me she was going to pray for the new house that her family has recently bought, and the new puppy she hopes will come with it...) and considering she's from a non-Christian background I think that's a bit of a deal.

Is now the right time to ask her where she stands and if she'd be ready to accept Christ? She's 12 and been coming to Sunday school on and off all year...?

Things of Power

I think recently I've noticed how different the power of God is to the power of man, and the things God considers powerful as opposed to us.
Our side of the spectrum is more and more clear cut as culture allows brutal levels of honesty into acceptable spheres of thought and behaviour. Money. Success. Information.Beauty. Status-these things are well known and loved by our world.
But God uses very different things to work through; it is very true that it is the weak that he uses to shame the strong. His Word, the most powerful of all, that which can divide soul and spirit is contained in a small but easily accessible (well, this side of the east-west schism) book. So accessible and simple in fact that for this very reason many people doubt the same power it testifies to. God's creativity is so well-formed and rationaled- if they do not listen to the Word of Moses and the Prophets they will not believe, even if someone rises from the dead, (Luke 16) thus you may as well give them the best opportunity of coming into contact with such a Word as this, and in such a form that they are not confronted by its power but drawn to it slowly as they watch their Lord's mystery unfold.
We also understand that our own words hold great power- they are the words we speak both to our Lord and about him to people everywhere. In Genesis the Tower of Babel was halted by God confusing the people's language, and in Acts 2 we see the gospel sent out again by people speaking in many different languages. Our parents give declaration at our baptism that they desire for us to live with Jesus as Lord, we pray a prayer at our conversion, and understand the weight of marriage vows. Our world mightn't value words as powerful, but God has created them as instruments to be used for his glory with abundant power.
God also values faith, and gives it power. By faith Abraham was credited with righteousness and we understand too that by retaining this same faith, we too can be transformed from sinners to righteous people, surely a power that was beyond the OT Law (though that is another story for another day). Part and parcel with this faith is trust, and particularly in God's promises. A faithful God, for a faithful people.
God gives power to relationships and sex, not that they might invoke status of one man or woman over another but that by sex within marriage status might actually be relinquished, the two becoming the same person; in doing so teaching us more about the trinitarian relationship in the Godhead and his relationship with us. In fact, in all three of these examples, His Word, faith and relationships he gives power to things that allow us to learn more about Himself (and as a result ourselves also).
I believe that is why God doesn't give a stuff how much you own, how educated you are, how successful or beautiful or well-known you are, because none of these things teach you about him, and thus ourselves, and so for a while they allow us to pretend that we wield power we don't. But God offers to us power of a different kind, and longs for us to take it, that forever we might continue to grow and so bring glory to His name.

Knowing God= Forgetting suffering?

I was reading J I Packer Knowing God recently (rad book, everyone should read it) and came across an argument I found I couldn't make up my mind about...

In our approach to problems of Christian living; the question is, can we say, simply, honestly, not because we feel that as evangelicals we ought to, but because it is plain matter of fact, that we have known God, and that because we have known God the unpleasantness we have had, or the pleasantness we have not had, through being Christian does not matter to us? If we really knew God this is what we would be saying, and if we are not saying it, that is a sign that we need to face ourselves more sharply with the differnece between knowing God and merely knowing about him.

It's part of a greater argument about whether we know God and that we don't KNOW him through learning theology in a vacuum, but this part stands on it's own as well. Are we called for our suffering not to make a difference? Understanding that it is refining us, but it not essentially affecting our mentality? Is this the way to 'rejoice'?

Thoughts?