From seventh grade to freshman year of high school, I lived in a rich community outside of Chicago. In that community I was surrounded by people who always seemed to have “better” things than I had. Better houses, better cars, clothes, phones, better everything. But out of all of that, the biggest thing was better bodies. I got my dad’s body. Although I’m petite, there is no thigh gap and has never been a thigh gap; my thighs have been BFFs since birth. I definitely can’t eat whatever I want and get away with it. I can’t even just eat healthily and get away with it. I have to get my butt in the gym and work for it. During those years in middle school and high school, I wasn’t into eating healthy or going to the gym. I didn’t know having a gym membership or going to cycle class was a “thing” when you were in eighth grade but there, it was. So, as I’m sure you can imagine, I was insecure about how I looked.

But not really just insecure; it was more of a disgusted feeling. I constantly looked at the girls around me, constantly looked at girls and women in the media and constantly compared myself to them. Why can’t I be skinny? Why can’t I have bigger boobs or smaller legs or a flat stomach? Why, why, why, why, why, why. Even after I moved back down south where I was considered “skinny,” my self-loathing continued into my later years of high school.

But, one night changed it all for me and we were doing a study along the lines of a girls’ journey with God. I still remember the night that my “light bulb” went off. The woman was talking about how girls in today’s society hate their bodies and how they look and are constantly comparing and scrutinizing, literally everything I was feeling and saying to myself at the time. Then the woman talked about God for a moment. She asked, “Do you think God ever gets sad? Sad when we put ourselves down or say we hate a part of ourselves. He must be saying, “What do you mean you hate your body or hair or nose or whatever else. I worked so hard on you.” She continued into saying how much God loves us. God doesn’t make mistakes. He makes us in His image so why would he make anything less than perfection? In His eyes, each and every one of us is perfect and how sad he must get when we don’t see or feel that ourselves. I remember comparing it to when we finish a project and are really proud of it with our faces’ gleaming, that’s how God must feel about each and every one of us. That night and that moment was so…profound.

From then on, it was like everything negative I had ever felt about myself and how I looked had washed away. It was like God planned for me to be apart of that girls’ study just to hear that. To hear how much God loved me, regardless of the things I considered imperfections, and start loving myself in the way God does, and that’s what I did. Now, I didn’t start strutting around in a two piece saying look at me I love my body, but I respected myself and I became confident in myself. I took care of my body and was proud of it instead of ashamed. I won’t say I don’t ever feel bad about my body or don’t get in a rut where I compare myself to other girls still, but I know that as humans, there is always something we want to change about ourselves. And once we have, we just move on to the next thing. But, through all of the body shaming and feeling gross or like I haven’t worked hard enough in the gym or aren’t seeing the results I want or like a beached whale, it is such a comforting feeling knowing that God will always look at every single one of us and think we are exactly how He made us, beautiful and perfect.

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” –Genesis 1:27