When
nineteen-year old
Sheryl enters holy matrimony, according to The Talking Palm:
How the childhood storms of a
young
woman’s life remained hidden until a palm fruit started talking:
http://www.amzn.to/175EzBh
she does so with a measure of low self-esteem. She thinks she is too
tall. In fact, she is taller than her peers and as tall as her
six-foot tall fiance. Sheryl does not like that. She does not want
to be as tall as her fiancé.
That makes her uncomfortable, especially because she grows up hearing
and believing that girls should be shorter than men.
But Sheryl has
never fitted that man-woman height mold. To her, she has always
towered over her peers. In fact, when she was younger, she felt so
desperate, that she asked God to shorten her.
She
now stands at the threshold of womanhood, and looks across her
fiancé's face, not up at
him. Sheryl is not happy about that because the ability to look up
at the man, she thinks, is what makes a woman feel pretty, fragile
and feminine. She goes into her wedding not feeling as feminine and
pretty as her shorter girlfriends.
The
problem here is that teenager Sheryl has not yet learned that God,
not culture, should be the source of her identity. If she discovers
and believes whom God says she is and what He thinks of her, that
knowledge is enough to ground her and build her up into a confident
and powerful young woman.
How
do you think a young woman's dependence on societal norms of beauty
can impact her sense of self and hence, her marriage?
Thank you.
Esther Jno-Charles
http://www.amzn.to/175EzBh
