Love and Dirty Laundry

This Monday the daily reading from Ransomed Heart Ministries quoted Gerald May,

Choosing love will open spaces of immense beauty and joy for you, but you will be hurt. You already know this. You have retreated from love countless times in your life because of it. We all have. We have been and will be hurt by the loss of loved ones, by what they have done to us and we to them. Even in the bliss of love there is a certain exquisite pain: the pain of too much beauty, of overwhelming magnificence. Further, no matter how perfect a love may be, it is never really satisfied . . . In both joy and pain, love is boundless.


It is the 10 month anniversary of my marriage and I am thinking how much of the joy and pain of being a newlywed is tied up in the ways marriage challenges me to love.

Marriage can be beautiful:

I relish the bliss of discovering more and more love everyday

unapologetically.

I find my writing centering around what Love is doing in me because everything has changed. Priorities are shifting. New ideas about Love, God and myself are boring pathways through the scar tissue of my diseased mind.

And this process of changing means Marriage can be painful:

Here’s the latest thought I am trying on for size-

Thin does not equal beautiful.

Though prior to my marriage, I would never have acknowledged the strength of my mental correlation between size and beauty, it was there—lurking in a dark corner of my mind, always vigilant to remind me never to relax around food.

This belief is the desperate woman in me-- thin, beautiful, and grasping. After a week of living with me 24/7 Tim recognized my fear for the life-draining taskmaster she is. One morning as I mutilated my omelet while I mustered confidence to eat it, he called me out on it, “Sarah eating those eggs will not make you less beautiful.”

My heart beat fast.

My head felt light.

Hope stirred inside my stomach.

and the desperate woman in me rebelled against truth’s awakening

I cannot remember a time in my life where upon entering a room I did not feel that I had been thrust into an unspoken beauty competition with every other woman present-- a sick competition where “thinness” was the first category on the judge’s rubric.

A rubric I had failed to pass for the first 18 years of my life.

I grew up in chaos. I coped by vacillating between inflicting bizarre diets upon myself to punish me for feeling and then when I could no longer resist the comfort of food, stuffing the pain with Doritos and cream cheese. I was a thick teenager. Food was my frien-nemy, and

Thinness was my heart’s desire.

being thin meant I would be beautiful, accepted, desired…

Like every girl becoming a woman these are the things I lusted after.

Even when they became my idols and started taking over my life.

I accepted the paranoia as a matter of course until I got married… and it started driving my husband crazy. Right away Tim saw me for who I was, a little girl sitting on top of a hamper packed with a thousand pieces of dirty laundry-- unwashed memories that had attached to putrid beliefs and were only held in check by so many compulsions.

I was desperate to be so grown-up and independent. To have someone see the girl in me was unsettling. Tim was fine with his boyishness. He was both gladdened and confused by the discovery of a girl surviving inside his somber, grown-up bride.

The girl-Sarah seemed nice enough, but why did she insist on sitting on a hamper all day? He invited her eat ice cream and dance. I refused explaining I was forced to sit on top of my hamper to prevent it from exploding dirty laundry around the room and strewing the floor with all my painful stains and memories.

For awhile the girl in me attempted to convince Tim that holding my hands and swaying back and forth while I sat on the hamper could be as fun as ice cream and dancing.


To his credit, he went along. For weeks a befuddled Tim patiently tried to negotiate the hamper—the way I had survived. Nobody had warned him about how confusing girls could be.

I was confused by Tim too. I had thought the hamper would make Tim happy. Compulsion kept my body looking great by almost everyone’s standards, and it kept the dirty laundry off the floor. I thought only I would know inside I was rotting. Desensitized by a over a decade of sitting on top of filth I had forgotten how much the rancid mass of laundry stank.

As I watched the compulsions like knives stabbing his love for life every time his exuberance threatened their control, I saw my future boil down to a choice:

Who would I let love me— My husband or the hamper which had for years hidden all my dirty laundry?

Conviction stung as I acknowledged to myself this hamper I had been sitting on was all about me.

• Me needing to exercise.
• Me frowning as I size up my body in the mirror.
• Me afraid of other women.
• Me requesting that he cook with less oil.
• Me hungry and mean.
• Me crying on the floor.

me, me, Me…

So the next time Tim extended an arm to me and asked “Would you come down and dance?” I swallowed the fear in my belly and rose to take hold of his hand. Immediately dirty laundry flew everywhere. I was crying, hiding my face, because I “always make a mess of things.”

But Tim was picking up the memories all over the floor and loading them into the washer with plenty of strong soap… saying “don’t worry, Sarah. These will come clean in the wash. You’ll see.”

And the reordering of life’s priorities began.

Soon I was taking out clean beliefs to try them on for size.

Starting with the idea that being thin should not be equated with being beautiful. For me being thin is about the dirty laundry and the ugly grasping compulsions. Thinness is not beauty-- it is the most hideous parts of me demanding that I kill myself to remain thin and giving me subtle strokes when I feel that I have beaten other women in the rat race, but I hate it.

Hate the shallow person obsession makes me.

Hate the ways I bow to fear and worship the idol of Thin.

Because of the way Thinness has used my desire to be beautiful as a power card to demand my worship, God has shown me the source of my beauty is the first battle I need to settle in my soul.

In Plan B Further Thoughts on Faith, Anne Lammot reveals two truths that have made it so she no longer feels compelled to compete with the "skinny girls":

(1) When we get to heaven, we will discover that the appearance of our butts and our skin was 127th on the list of what mattered on this earth.

(2) And that I am not going to live forever.

Knowing these things has set me free.

This life is too short for all my energy, passion, adoration, and hope to be tied of in compulsions about my body:

Truth of God,

I beg you to reveal to my soul what is beautiful and pleasing in your sight. Make me a woman who takes your breath away.

Most Beautiful Jesus,

You taught your disciples. “The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life (John 6:63)” Feed my heart with your word so that I no longer crave the feeling of beauty thinness can give

… please continue to wash all this dirty laundry.