Fearfully and Wonderfully Made
I took my daughter to draw a nude model.
We moved to England almonst two years ago and my daughter, who is in her mid-teens and homeschooled, wanted to find an art class. She is serious about developing her art skills and was ready to delve into something more sophisticated. I searched and searched and was wholly unable to find a teen art class. England is different than the US; everything it appears is done through the schools. In Texas, I would have had no problem finding 18 different art classes for her to try out. Here, I found one. One. In the whole city.
It was a long pose class. I emailed the instructor to get some information and asked, to be sure, whether the model would be nude. “Of course,” he responded, “but the models are almost always female as there are not many male art models in the area.” Oh, boy.
My daughter takes her art seriously and has a stable head on her shoulders, so I let her know her options: nude or nada. At first, she was a solid “no,” but later that day she came to me and said that she was game to try if I would go with her. Having already been introduced to drawing nudes by one of my artist besties, I knew what to expect and was more than willing to take her.
More than willing? Well, yes. You see, my daughter, like almost every other teenage girl since the beginning of time, has body-image issues. (Don’t we all, when it comes down to it?) I thought I knew what would happen once she got to the class, and I was right.
A very normal, very naked, 60-something-year-old female model was laying on the softly draped, well-lit table. With one or two glances from my daughter for reassurance, we gathered our tables and chairs, set up our materials, and began to draw.
Within moments, she was engrossed. In the quiet room, surrounded by a handful of other artists, we drew. We studied the light, the shapes, the shadows, lulled into the relaxed focus of an artist with nothing to do but create by the soft scratching of pencils and the rustling of paper.
I had to leave after an hour to attend to a coaching client, but she opted to stay on to complete the 3-hour session. When she came home, she was enthralled! She couldn’t wait to attend the next one! As I probed a little more, she shared that after the initial shock, she just saw the woman from an artist’s perspective…an object to be studied. She had been able to move into the mindset that the human body is beautiful just as it is, without it needing to be a suped-up bikini model that can prance around in skin-tight whatevers without a jiggle to detect. The body was just that, a body. And it was worthy of art.
I wanted her to have this experience because I want her to move out of the body negativity/body positivity mindset and into body neutrality.
Body neutrality is the best thing for self-acceptance since sliced bread. It avoids both the pitfalls of negativity and positivity. It neither forces a mindset of “my body is hideous and I have to manhandle it into perfect condition” nor the mantra of “my body is absolutely perfect the way it is and I don’t have to worry about my health as long as I perceive myself as beautiful.” Body neutrality says, “I am grateful for my body. I love it and I care for it. There are some things I like and some things I don’t, but what really matters is that it’s made by God and it’s mine.”
Body neutrality reminds us that our body is a living temple to use to honor God.
It is a living temple, and so we should neither hate it nor abuse it. It is our responsibility to care for our temple as part of being good stewards. Just like we would all chip in to care for our local church, we should all be chipping in to care for the portable temple that we are carting around with us. Likewise, we should enjoy our living temple. It is a thing of beauty that God made just for us to inhabit!
More importantly, it is ours to use to honor God. If we are abusing this gift from God through poor food choices, overindulgence, lack of exercise, insufficient sleep, or unstemmed stress, we are not honoring Him and His gift. And, if we are hating our gift by always finding fault, pushing it to always be better, and never being satisfied, we are also not honoring Him and His gift.
Psalm 139 has to be one of the greatest love letters ever written, between David and the Father, and in it he praises God, saying
“For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.” (Psalm 139: 13-15)
The Father. The Creator. The Author. The Perfector. He made you. He knitted you together. Nothing about you was a surprise to Him but was handcrafted with care and attention by the Master of Artists. His works are wonderful and you are one of them.
And so is my daughter. And so was the model.
Did my daughter’s self-image fix itself overnight? Of course not. But my prayer and my hope is that, through our nudy art classes, she will begin to see herself through the same artists’ eyes that she views the model and will realize that she, too, is fearfully and wonderfully made.
