abercrombie models

break has broken me.
today my mom was kind enough to not only come to the mall with me, gracing me with her company, but she also bought me new clothes for new years. tuttle mall was insane. i like to go to tuttle for a few reasons...
1) it's where i grew up going (besides city center-->where people die).
2) i know where everything is and it's close.
3) sometimes i feel bad for it. it is becoming little bit run down. it's glam has worn off and polaris and easton are taking all the glory.
today was worse than before christmas--it was after christmas. the time when everyone runs to the mall to return, exchange and buy as many things on sale as possible. as we waded through the crowd--kids running from their parents, husbands waiting outside talbots, women frantically sifting through clearance racks--we passed abercrombie. looking inside, thinking about how i would love a new sweatshirt, i glanced at the gigantic picture of the half naked male model sitting in the entrance.
(this sentence kind of sounds like there was an extremely overweight naked man standing in abercrombie, if that's the picture you got...it's not what i meant.)
my thoughts shifted from, "oh wouldn't be nice to have a new sweatshirt that's soft and smells like abercrombie..." to "hm...that man is really attractive."
(i so badly just wanted to type..."oh wouldn't it be nice to have that man that's soft and smells like abercrombie" haha. so there. i did. but it wasn't what i was thinking.)
i started to think about what makes things beautiful. who decides. how can people possibly be thrown into a category. beautiful/not beautiful. it seems like a pretty ridiculous binary. as i kept walking, on my mission to reach macy's, i began to see people differently. my eyes stumbled upon a man probably in his early thirties, scruffy beard, winter hat, large coat, glasses, and i thought to myself...i could think he was beautiful. he could be really beautiful. not like i had a thing for him but seriously why do we think we get to decide what is attractive and what isn't.

parallel to this i am learning a lot about myself. basically because i'm pretty insecure and look to other people to decide my purpose and worth. i pray that i would know God's love. i pray that i could be secure in how he sees and knows me. i pray that i would be confident in my relationship with him when all else fails me. i beg for dependence on Christ.
freedom. i want to stand in a place where i am free. i want to know who i am. i want to see myself through my God's eyes. i want to learn this. to learn what satisfaction, complete and full, in the Lord looks and feels like.