Empty?

I felt empty.

Steve and I had dreamt about this weekend.

We had loved our time at Keele University:

the campus, the courses, the nightlife,

and the Christian Union.

The CU weekends away with inspirational teaching, relationship building and muddy football games were an annual highlight.

We walked away after graduation both wanting to go back and impart into students at a later date.

Knowing the CU president and our return to England imminent, the stars seemed to have aligned and opened an opportunity.

We were excited and eagerly anticipated all the things we would do, the ways Father God would move.

Who would have known that we would travel to that weekend, driving away from a house shrouded in grief just less than three weeks previously.

Like I said, I felt empty.

The weekend passed like a blur.
We had planned and prepared as diligently as ever, but I looked back and questioned whether things were as creative as we could have made them,

whether we really challenged them enough,

if our words were full of Holy Spirit, or just read off of a paper.

I wondered if I had really given my best,

if we had done the right thing.

After the weekend, our Facebook burgeoned with friend requests, comments about how much our talk spoke to them. And I got the warm and fuzzies.

When you think you don’t do well,

When things are super hard,

But you step out in faith regardless,

God can do great things.

True.

But not the end.

The thing is

I don’t just want warm and fuzzies.

I don’t just want to experience the high of a temporary feeling.

To think I did something good one day

And the next

Nothing substantial has changed

More was in store:

Never would I have imagined

That out of pouring myself out

That weekend still grieving

And being open to what Father wanted to do

That now

Two years to the day later

These girls who sat on seats and listened

Politely taking notes and clapping in the right places

Now

Sit at my table

Text me

Do lunch

Talk birth

Live chat through Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners

And pour into my sweet daughter

(with Petit Filous)

I don’t have much to offer this great world

Just my stories

My inappropriate humour

My meager words

And my love for people

But offer it I will

In the hopes that my longevity

My sticking around and involved

 it makes some difference

It changes some directions

It makes Father God bigger,

more visible,

more tangible,

in more lives.

Selfie

I’ll say it once, nice and loud for you all to hear:

"I want to see your face, but I don’t want to see your face THAT much."

Some pictures of you on hols,

hanging out with friends,

trying out new make up,

and definitely with cool clothes on.

But fill my newsfeed with twenty of the same posed,

but trying to be natural shot

With sepia, willow, X Pro II and every other filter under the sun

And I will delete you.

I rarely put up selfies.

If I do,

they either contain my sidekick Zella:

Or me doing some ridiculous face:

No one wants to see just my normal face.

No one.

Putting a picture up of me,

just out there,

puts me on display.

Exposes me.

I remember being pregnant and getting requests from friends far away desperate to see my ever burgeoning bump, and I recoiled in fear, scared of comments I would get.

What if they didn’t think I was pretty?

Me with Zella? Well you have to think that’s cute.

Me with a stupid grin? Well you just have to laugh.

Me. Just me.

Well…what if it doesn’t get “likes”?

The truth is

Behind the newsfeed full of posed photos

Or the one devoid of them

There sits a woman with phone in hand

Girl with laptop

Lady staring at a screen

With a beauty to unveil

Wondering if anyone will see it

Notice it

Care about it

Love it

Bikini jumping at beach, ghetto twerking poses, inappropriate Halloween outfits

It all screams:

Do you see me?

Baggy clothes dragging, dark hair over eyes, scar marks on arms

It all screams

Do you see me?

We first became undone

That 1800s day

When we looked up from the bathroom sink

And our reflection stared back at us.

And then when the weighing scales,

that once resided so neatly on kitchen counters,

or so officially in doctors offices,

Encroached into our homes

With constant reminder

That we didn’t measure up

We weren’t the right fit

We unravelled further

My teeth aren’t straight.

I was too scared to get my teeth taken out,and so the orthodontist couldn’t put braces on, and I look at my wedding photos, and regret that moment of teenage worry that means my mouth isn’t Colgate ad worthy.

My body feels weird.

Early puberty meant that since age 11 I’ve been this size, this weight, but yet I never quite got a grasp on it, and justas I started to feel comfortable, pregnancy attacked it, and now bits have got bigger, and bits have got smaller; unwelcome visitors in a place I’d just started to feel at home with.

But I cling onto the words that my Father God continually impresses upon me:

I am beautiful.

And that is not determined by merely the outside.

A 1900s girl,

without the trappings of adverts and angst,

described herself

based on her character

her skills

her attributes.

She was not to be described as merely the sum of her body parts

So on Saturday afternoon,

humbled with a clumsy hot chocolate wetting through my lap,

the girls and I wrote,

the beauty we saw in oneanother.

This is my real selfie:

The irony that the same teeth that repel me,

Are seen by another as “beautiful smile” 

And that what makes a difference

In the lives of others

What makes the permanent change

In communities

Is not the colour of my eyes

The outfit I wore last week

My waist size

But my personality

My gifts

My heart

So girl with photos

Cluttering my newsfeed

You won’t get deleted today

Because 

just like me

You just want to know you're beautiful.