Episode 65: Your Body Matters!

Parents, this is the second in a series designed to help kids deal with gender confusion by showing them that no matter what they like or what they look like or what they are good at, they are still boys and girls. When we try to push kids into filling stereotypical roles, we’re often the ones creating the confusion that they are forced to find a way to live with. I do this without making any mention of sexuality whatsoever.

You are a wonderful work of art! You are your body and your body is you—you can’t do anything without your body! And a lot of people will have a lot of opinions about you and your body but what’s the truth? Probably not what you think.

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.

Your body is an amazing creation—there is absolutely nothing else like it and there is absolutely no one exactly like you. I am glad you were born. I am thrilled. You obviously weren’t a mistake or a goof. You are a gift to the world. You are someone whom God has important plans for, and God will get those things done through your body. What do I mean? You are listening to this or reading this with your body. You are thinking about what I am saying and asking questions with your body. When you have to get up and go pee, you will also do that with your body. You can’t do a thing without your body. You are your body and your body is you! And because you are unique, your body is unique too. Unless you are an identical twin, no one else has your fingerprints or your exact face. And even if you are an identical twin, you probably have a scar or a freckle here or there that your twin doesn’t have. No two people on earth are entirely identical because our different bodies have experienced different things. We might do our hair differently. Maybe you wear big thick glasses just like me. Maybe you will have size 13 feet like my son Matthew. Maybe you have a bump on the bridge of your nose like my son Andrew. Or maybe you have tiny little ears like my husband. There are millions of different ways that our bodies can be different from each other and that’s the most wonderful thing of all. You aren’t like anyone else. God doesn’t just have a machine that churns out a bunch of people who look like Barbie and Ken dolls. Good thing too—Barbie’s body would not be very pleasant to have in real life! Especially her feet. She can’t even stand up unless she is wearing high heels! What’s up with that anyway? She looks pretty tall to me so why is she always standing on her tip-toes like she is trying to look over a fence? Okay, enough of that foolishness.

And we are all different sizes too. I am really short. Most of you kids will tower over me when you grow up and some of you might already because I am barely 5’1” tall. My son Matthew is 6’ tall.  My friend Ryan is 6’2” and when we are together we look like David and Goliath because he has huge shoulders and a lot of muscles! I will need to post a picture of us together in the transcript because it is really hilarious. Next to him, I look like a child—a child with wrinkles! And King David was probably only four inches taller than I am and that would have been much more normal for his time. We know from the skeletons that archaeologists have dug up that all the heroes of the Bible were small compared to us. Even Goliath was only about 6’9” according to our earliest manuscripts of I Samuel, where we find the story of David and Goliath. Shaquille O’Neill is way taller than that. And Yao Ming makes Shaq look like just a normal guy. I love the picture of the two of them with Kevin Hart, who is just an inch taller than I am. They look like giants next to him even though he is taller than me. And Simone Biles is 4’8”, five inches shorter than me! And there are grown ups even smaller than Simone Biles who do amazing things! So, if you are short or tall or somewhere in between, there are a whole lot of people just like you. Women are usually shorter than men but not always. Julia Child, a famous cook, was 6’2” tall and her husband Claude was six inches shorter than she was and they were married for 48 years!

And some people weigh very little and others weigh a lot. Did you know that if you look at the history of art, you can see that ideas about what makes someone beautiful or handsome change all the time? Sometimes people think that being full figured is the ideal, meaning the way things should be, and at other times, people aren’t allowed to hardly even eat anything if they want people to think they are attractive. What does this tell us? It tells us that people are just fickle and silly and they change their minds all the time. What is considered attractive right now might have been seen as awful not so long ago. And so, it is a good idea to just shrug when people say that this or that is good-looking and something else isn’t because you can look at paintings and see that there is no normal when it comes to what people think looks good. What you get are people’s opinions and their opinions aren’t the same thing as the truth. People have no idea how much their opinions have been given to them by other people and by movies and tv anyway. They have been told what to believe but then we have reality. The reality is that someone is going to look at you someday and see you, who you are, and they are going to think that you are definitely all that and a bag of chips. They might be too shy to tell you, but believe me, you are more than you see in the mirror because your opinions have also been given to you by others.

What makes a person beautiful or handsome or whatever—it’s very complicated and it is absolutely different for everyone. When I met my husband, when I was fourteen years old, I didn’t see his tiny ears or the fact that he had short legs and a really long upper body, or the fact that he liked to wear really tall socks with sandals, or anything else that someone who didn’t like him would notice right away. And right now, I don’t really notice the fact that a lot of his hair is gone, or the wrinkles, or his bushy eyebrows that he insists on growing out. To me, he looks like my husband and because I know him, I think he is just as good looking now as I did back in 1984 when we met. You wouldn’t look at him and see what I can see very clearly, just like if I were to look at you, I might not see the wonderful things that someone else does. But because I know that God made your body and your face and your everything, I would love to look at you. You are a work of art. And I will tell you a secret—almost everyone thinks they are ugly. We see everything we think is wrong and not what is right. We see our crooked teeth and our moles and freckles and our noses and all our lumps and bumps and then we look at the magazines and those perfect people in them and we just think of ourselves as losers. But if we were to see those real people without makeup and without the special lighting and the beautiful clothes and without the photoshopping and airbrushing, we would see people who look a whole lot more like us than they do like their magazine pictures. It’s too bad that when they put those people, who are also God’s works of art, into the magazines that they make them feel bad about themselves by erasing what we would see if we saw them in person. I bet that makes them feel kinda bad about how they look in real life.

But when we look at the movies and those pictures and all that—it just isn’t real. Normal men and normal women don’t look like that—not without spending all their time at the gym or without getting plastic surgery or without eating anything, or in front of the mirror doing makeup and hair and spending a ton of money on new clothes every year. And we all have to decide for ourselves what kind of life we want to live and how we want to spend our time and money. We have to ask ourselves what really makes us happy and what we really want to spend our time doing. There are people who really enjoy all that, and that’s fine, but if you hate it then you need to know that it’s okay to be who you are. Trust me, no matter what you do there will always be people telling you that you don’t look good enough. Even those people in the movies and magazines are always being told to lose weight even when it looks like they aren’t very healthy. It isn’t easy living up to other people’s standards of what makes someone good looking and, in fact, it is impossible because people’s standards and God’s standards are totally different.

What about skin color? There are so many different and wonderful shades of skin—from the whitest albino with truly white skin, to South Sudanese Africans who are so black that they look like they are made from polished obsidian and in certain lights they almost look dark blue. In Asia, they have people with skin that looks quite yellow, like the color of mustard seeds, and in Africa and Asia, there are people whose skin is quite red—when we look at ancient Egyptian art, their kings had red skin! And in between all of those, there must be a million different shades of all those beautiful colors. I have never seen a skin color that was ugly—except when people turn pale and green because they are going to get car sick in the back of my car. There is nothing pretty about that. King Solomon was a man in the Bible who had 700 wives and 300 women in his harem, and the reason that was given was that he loved foreign women. What does that even mean? It means that he saw all kinds of women as being beautiful, and we know that he had wives from Africa and many other places. The Bible doesn’t talk about skin color very often and when it does, it is hard to understand what is really meant by it. Honestly, I think the best thing is when we read the Bible to imagine not only ourselves but everyone else in the stories too. I do know one thing—Jesus didn’t look anything like me! But that’s okay because I, all of us, are supposed to look like Him in how we act! After all, Jesus isn’t like us, we need to be like Him. And we were all created equally able to be like Him. Even when people are telling us that we can’t be like Him because we aren’t the same kinds of people. But if only Jewish men could be like Jesus then we would all be in big trouble! Truth is, we were all equally created in God’s image even though there will always, always be people telling you otherwise.

And it’s confusing, isn’t it? I mean, it confuses me too. Really, it confuses everyone no matter how old they are. And it also isn’t very fair that other people think they should decide whether or not how God made you, or made you to look, is good enough. But it is what it is—I just want you to know that all those people aren’t always right, they just think they are. In fact, when God made you it was because He wanted to see Jesus in the world, working through your body doing things that only you can do. And no matter who you are, Jesus can shine through you just as well as He can through anyone else on earth. That’s true whether you are in a wheelchair or a hospital bed or running around the track or helping around the house or saying encouraging things and being helpful to neighbors. You have the power to give Jesus’s love and attention to the people who need it. And you might be the only person they ever meet who will do that for them. That means, no matter what your life looks like, you might just be the most important person some people ever meet because you will treat them like Jesus would treat them. You may save a lot of people’s lives, not by being a fireman or a police officer or a doctor or a rescue worker or a civil rights worker or whatever, but by helping them see Jesus’s love for them.

But the outside world doesn’t really value that sort of thing all the time. The outside world wants you to be just like them. They will look at some girls’ bodies and say, “Ugh, you look too much like a boy!” and some boys’ bodies and say, “Ugh, you are so girly!” But does that even make any sense? Is there one way for a boy to look and another way for a girl to look? If we randomly chose a girl or a boy out of the whole world, would anyone look just like them? And who on earth gets to decide what girls and boys should look like anyway? And how would they decide? And would it be fair? God already decided, and that’s why there are so many different ways that boys and girls can look. That’s why there are so many wonderful bodies out there doing wonderful things for God’s Kingdom.

What does a boy’s body look like anyway? I can only really think of one thing that matters and no one should be looking at that under normal conditions. If a boy’s body looks like a big, tall guy with huge muscles, then everyone would have to work out all the time in order to look like one and shorter men would be in huge trouble. But should someone have to work really hard to look like what they already are? That doesn’t make sense. Either you are a boy just the way you are, or you aren’t a boy at all. Boys, you are boys because God made you to be boys, and that is true no matter if you are big or small. Some guys say things like, “Real men have beards” but that can’t be true either because not everyone can grow a beard. Guys, people are going to tell you your whole life why you aren’t a real man for one reason or another and all of their reasons are going to be pretty much stupid. You will grow to be men because you were born as boys. Boys become men, all different kinds of men who look all different sorts of ways and who like different sorts of things and are talented in so many different ways. Some men aren’t better than others because of any of these things. They might be better at some things, but that doesn’t make them better men. Do you remember last week how we talked about the two different definitions of masculine? Traditionally, masculine means whatever your culture says it means and so masculine will look entirely different in different places. There are no absolute rules worldwide for what that kind of masculine means and so it means that whatever your culture says masculine is, is just an opinion, okay? The other definition of masculine is the right one. It just means that you were born a boy. Boys are masculine, they grow up to be men. No matter if you are a dancer or a banker or a football player or a stay-at-home dad or a janitor, you are still masculine. And if you are a quiet person, you don’t have to be loud. If you prefer reading and hate sports, there is nothing wrong with you. If you are amazing in the kitchen and not so good at fixing cars, then that must be how God made you. And if that is so, then it is wonderful that you are that way. We must need you to be just as you are.

And what does a girl’s body look like? Can you be a girl and not look like a girl? Can you be a bird and not look like a bird? You see how silly the question is when we look at it like that. Girls, you look like girls because you are girls and girls can look a lot of different ways. You don’t have to fit into any mold, any more than boys have to. Is it boyish to have strong arm muscles from playing baseball? No! When muscles get used, they get bigger, no matter whose muscles they are. The only difference is that boys’ muscles do generally get much bigger than the muscles on girls, but there are always exceptions. Does a girl not look like a girl if she doesn’t style her hair, or wear makeup, or put on dresses? Nope, that wouldn’t make any sense at all. The Bible doesn’t say anywhere that girls should do any of that. That’s what the world outside of the Bible invented. Makeup hides how we really look. Makeup is a decision some people make. In some cultures, men wear makeup too. That’s normal to them. And as your bodies change, you will see that every girl changes in different ways—some just a little bit and some a whole lot. But those girls are all still feminine, because girls are feminine. All you have to do to be called feminine is to be born a girl, it’s as simple as that. Of course, people will tell you all your life that it is more than that but just like with the boys, that word means different things in different places. In some places, to be feminine means to be the bosses of the whole community. That is their normal. And you can be loud, just not in the library please, and still be feminine. And you can be a car mechanic, all covered with black grease and oil, and be feminine. And you can be a terrible cook with a messy home, but great at heart surgery, and it doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with you. God created every girl differently, just like with the boys, so that there would be many different kinds of women—just like there are many different kinds of men.

You see, the problem is that when we tell people that they have to be a certain way and can only be interested in certain activities and they can only be good at certain things, it really messes us up on the inside because our brains and bodies are telling us one thing, that we are girls and boys who have been created to be this or that thing by God Himself, but on the outside, there are voices and pictures and books and movies telling us that if we aren’t girls and boys the way that people think we should be, that we aren’t really what we think we are. I never liked to wear dresses. I liked to play with boys with cars and to run around the neighborhood playing Star Wars. I didn’t like sports though. I loved reading and learning about science and history. I liked being in plays and singing too. But it was like I didn’t fit in anywhere. And even now I almost never dress up or wear makeup. I just don’t like it. So where do I fit in, anyway? Well, come to find out I never really needed to fit in, I needed to be who God created me to be. And most of my friends, the ones who stuck with me, they were the same types of girls who didn’t really fit the mold either. Together we could just be ourselves. And those are the very best kinds of friends to have, the kind that you can be yourself with. People who help you become a better version of you by allowing you to be yourself.

There will always, always—even when you grow up—be people who aren’t comfortable with who they are and so they try to be something else. But one of the goals of life is to accept how different we are from everyone else, and how like everyone else we are. Because no one is ever really all that different and no one is ever entirely the same either. You are an amazing combination of things that the world has never seen before and will never see again. And we need you. All of us need you. We need you to grow into who God created you to be and only God totally knows who that is, but you might be beginning to figure some of it out too. I never had the slightest idea who I was going to be—it’s just mind-boggling how it all turned out. I laugh about it all the time. God knew what He was doing when He made me. That doesn’t mean that I always made good choices or used my talents wisely. It also doesn’t mean that I didn’t try sometimes to be someone that I really couldn’t ever be. You are going to make mistakes as you grow and learn who you are and what God wants you to be. You are going to take wrong turns and try things that end up being a complete disaster, but that isn’t the end of your story. Most mistakes can be undone and you can begin again. Some mistakes take a lot of time to undo but don’t give up. It’s not the end of your story. I will say one thing—people will push you to do things that you can’t undo so be very careful about those decisions. They might want you to be something you aren’t, but sometimes they really put so much pressure on us that we feel like just giving in will be a relief. But remember that there is always tomorrow and that things can always change and sometimes something that seems like a horrible problem today wasn’t such a big deal after all.

People who love God and love themselves will also allow you to love yourself. And they are the best ones to help you see the wonderful things about yourself that you just can’t see. Sometimes people in the outside, it’s like they can’t see us at all and sometimes they can see us more clearly than we see ourselves. You are a wonderful work of art. You are not a waste of space or a mistake. You are not hopeless. You are just one of a kind. Jesus didn’t talk about people’s outsides—although He did say that no one can make themselves taller or change even a hair on their heads by worrying about it. Jesus talked about what the people who follow Him, the people who are becoming like Him, do. He talked about how they treat others, how loving they are, and peaceful, patient, kind, trustworthy, humble, gentle, and how they control themselves when they want to just do something awful. When you read the Sermon on the Mount, you don’t see anything about how we should look because that isn’t even important. He says nothing about being strong and powerful or pretty and a great cook. He says that we need to be different from the people who don’t follow Him in how we think and act and how we treat others.

God gave me a dream once about someone who had died many years before. No one would ever say she looked like a supermodel, but she was smart and funny and a kind person. In my dream, she was walking toward me, all dressed in white. She looked just like she always did but I saw her through the eyes of God, and she was the most beautiful person I have ever seen in my life. When I woke up, I cried and cried because I couldn’t see her anymore. And I know that when we die, and when we get our new bodies that we will still have our same faces, but we will also be more beautiful than anything we have ever imagined. It isn’t our faces and our bodies that are the problem. The problem is the sin that tells us that some people are good looking and other people aren’t, or that there is a right and a wrong way to look like who we are. But more than being beautiful in the future, we are beautiful now. Nothing had changed about the way she looked and so the thing God changed must have been me. I couldn’t see before that how perfectly beautiful she was—my eyes and my brain were giving me the wrong messages. But in that dream when God fixed them, I saw her how He sees her. And I know that if I looked at you in the same way, I would know how perfectly wonderful you are too. I love you. I am praying for you. I pray you have a wonderful week not just reading the Bible, but also really listening to the people who know just how wonderful you are.