Last week my feet led me to that black money pit, aka the
mall. There’s nothing special about this as I habit the mall frequently. But
anyway, for once I decided to not focus so much on shopping and I instead
started looking around at the people in the stores. Usually people watching is
not my gig; it’s occasionally too depressing. Everyone seems so unhappy. But
this time I just wanted to see the expressions of the women who were shopping
in the stores. Peering at them, I all saw variations of the same thing:
desperation, discontentment, and hunted, harried faces. Everyone in there was
desperately searching for something…if only they could find it.
I understand that when you’re perusing racks in a store,
your facial expressions do not really share the best about you. Yes. But the
discontent on each person’s face said so much more than anything else. It was
as if they were dissatisfied with themselves and what they were looking at.
And, to be quite honest, I understood the feelings. There
have been many, many times in my life where I was frantically searching for
something in a store, certain that if I just had something new to wear that
everything would be fine and that the feelings of irritation at my own flaws
would fade and dissipate…if ONLY I could get the mirror to look how I wanted it
to. I know for a fact that I’m not the only woman who feels this way on
occasion. But I have to ask myself the question: why?
There seems to be a thought that correlates in women’s
minds, and true, not just women’s minds but primarily in that category, and it
goes along the lines of: I either can’t/won’t/am not able to change my
situation so I do what I can and I change the outside. How many times has a
woman tried to mask what she felt on the inside by pasting a fraud on her
outside? How many times do we hide our insecurities, our flaws, our failures,
the disagreeable parts of our temperaments with something artificial and
shallow like a new haircut or color or shade of lipstick? How many times do we
reach inside the dissatisfaction bottle and pull out a new change to hide it?
This happens more often than we would like to admit. For
some of us, it happens every day. That restless, gnawing dissatisfaction with
what we have and how we look. And there really is no true cure for it. You can
buy until you’ve maxed out every card. Fix your hair until you’re blue in the
face. You can change everything you possibly can in the book about yourself but
until you dig down deep and go to the heart of the matter, no cure will
satisfy.
Our hearts all beat with the same desires: to be heard, to
be loved, to love back, to become something and to have a purpose. We were all
created with a drive, the same humanistic drive that leads us to always push
farther and push faster. But this drive should not always correspond to the
outside. A drive to change should be channeled inward and upward. The only
meaningful change can come through an experience with the One who never
changes, and whose grace and mercy is enough. Nothing needs to be added,
nothing needs to be modified to make Him better – God is simply enough.
I want Him to be enough for me today and for every day.
”Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh
of this water shall thirst again: But whosoever drinketh of the water that I
shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be
in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.” John 4: 13-14
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