This is a blog for all my young ladies out there. You are my sisters in Christ whom I love so much and treasure dearly. I hope this reaches you where you are in life at this very moment, and in it you find not judgement, but someone who is giving you a giant HUG!
Young girls today are faced with hardships that are beyond comprehensible for some to understand. There is your typical peer pressure: pressure to try drugs, to drink, to have sex, to do things that are almost sex, to THINK about sex, to cheat, to lie, and the list goes on and on. Then there is the pressure that lies behind every woman (even older, wiser, and mature women) to go to extreme measures to FEEL beautiful. We invest thousands of dollars a year in makeup, and even more then that in brand new clothes, jewelry, shoes, and other accessories. We are constantly comparing ourselves to women around us and letting our viewpoint of them dictate how we feel about ourselves. "Oh she is so thin, I am so fat. Oh but look at her, she has put on some weight, I think I look pretty good." We are constantly trying the latest diet trends and exercise craze in order to shed some lb's. We diet, we get dumped, we eat, we diet. We diet, we have a stressful day at work, we pig out, we diet. We diet, we get into a fight with our significant other, we buy chocolate-we eat said chocolate, we cry because we ate so much chocolate, then we diet again. It is a vicious endless cycle that needs to end.
Young women today have SO much pressure on them from the world that from the outside looking in I wonder, when and where is the time we get to just relax and be ourselves? Well ladies, God is ALWAYS calling us to be ourselves. But the trouble is, we get so lost in the ways of the world, the temptation, the failing diets, the exercise trends, the latest gossip among friends, the newest clothing lines, tanning, materialism, etc, that it consumes our identity, and we forget WHOSE we are.
One of my favorite Psalms is Psalms 139, and it romantically shows us a loving and protecting and all knowing Heavenly Father who knows us inside and out better than anyone on the planet (Ps 139:1-6), whom we cannot ever escape (Ps 139:7-12), and who created us perfectly, wonderfully, and fearfully in His own image and knew all that we would be and do before we even lived one day (Ps 139:13-18). I don't know about you guys but this is GREAT news to me!!! I love this news. Isn't it the female way to be understood and known better than we know ourselves? Isn't it a female desire that we are loved by a Lover whom we can never escape, no matter how crazy we get sometimes? And isn't it the female desperation to know how beautiful we are all the time? Well we have a Father who is all of these things for us. But so often we forget....and when we forget, we start getting holes in our heart that are "God-shaped".
Have you ever played that game as a kid (or more recently with small children) where you have to place the different shaped pegs inside of a box or bucket or something? The triangle peg will never fit into the circle hole. And the square peg will never fit into the diamond hole. That is not how those pegs were created to function. And when stretched to do something they were never intended to do, is when things get BROKEN. All of us--women, men, children even--have wounds and scars. Wounds being things we have not healed from and scars being things maybe we have healed from but situations which left an imprint behind as a reminder of what we had to go through to get it. And we most certainly all have holes in our hearts. Often times, one of those is a God-shaped hole as a wise friend once told me. All the women I have ever known including myself have used every tactic and resource in the book to fill that God-shaped hole. We use chocolate, girlfriends, our careers, obsession with looks, materialism, and certainly most dangerously---MEN!
We jump from relationship to relationship expecting these men to fill this hole that we have. But like the circle peg, we are trying to get them to fulfill a function that they were never created to do. And it isn't just our God holes where we try to place relationships. Have an absent father? Let's shove a boyfriend in there. Have dependency issues? Squeeze a guy in that hole. Have a crazy family? Let's shove several bad relationships in that spot. Yea ladies, it just doesn't work that way. Because here is what happens (and there is lots of bad things that can and will happen when doing this).
1. The men go crazy because of all of the pressure we put on them to serve in functions they were never supposed to serve in. 2. We continually get our hearts broken because we put all expectations into people who are just that, people. Imperfect humans whom no matter the good intentions, just fail sometimes because we all do. 3. We end up missing HUGE chunks of our hearts because we so freely and carelessly give it away to those who mistreat it in hopes that we will find what we are looking for. 4. We stray farther and farther away from God while believing this lie that satan has tricked us into believing until one day we wake up and realize we not only don't see God at all anymore but we look in the mirror and don't even recognize ourselves.
You may be wondering why this blog is called Big Giant Jigsaw Puzzle Heart. I spoke at a young girls retreat a few months ago. The theme of the weekend was being God's Princess-your identity in Christ. I feel like so much of knowing who you are in Christ, is recognizing where you once were. So for one of the sessions I spoke, I gave my testimony. I am an artsy and craftsy kind of gal so I used a visual aid for the talk. I used a piece of large colorful cardboard. On one side of the board was my life before Christ. I used a felt heart cut into jigsaw pieces to show this side. I started from the top of the heart, taking away one piece at a time as I talked about that piece and what it represented. It ranged from things like divorced parents, abandonment issues, alcoholic stepmother, etc. When I got to the bottom the very last piece of my heart said SAVED. And when I got there, I told my salvation story. And when I flipped the cardboard over, I slowly started putting back together a new heart! With pieces that this time said things like ministry, church family, healing, and ended with the last piece which said "to be continued"--because every single day God is working on new ways to heal my once shattered, tattered, and broken heart. And what I am realizing as He is doing that, is that although MANY circumstances happened beyond my control, it led to me making poor choices. Choices that were very much IN my control, and decisions were inevitably what was breaking my own heart into pieces.
I see and work with so many girls who are following that same destructive pattern. Using relationships with boys to fill a God-shaped hole. When you do that girls, you are walking down a slippery slippery slope that not only is creating an environment of temptation and impurity but also breaking your own heart when your expectations are not met. I know you are young, and you think you are in love (and maybe you are, who knows) but I STRONGLY urge you girls to use your youth to build relationships with other girls! We we are PURE-we are seeing more of God's beauty and grace and power! Mt 5:8 says "Blessed are the PURE in HEART for they shall SEE GOD!" WOW! I don't know about you guys but I certainly want to see me some Jesus can I get an amen!?
And please hear me if you have heard nothing else, this is not a blog to lay guilt or pass judgement, but to wrap you up in my cyber-arms and tell you how much you are so very very loved. That you are a precious little princess whom God wants to dance with all day long. He is just begging you for your attention! Won't you shut out the drama and temptation and boys of the world long enough to let Him have all of you for a little while? One song with Him might change the way you sing forever! I encourage you to pray about purity and what that looks like in your life right now...and to seek out other Christian women (older preferrably) to help mentor and guide you as you grow up in such a hard hard time. We are not saying that it is easy, but I am PROMISING that it is WORTH it!
In Him,
Meg
