Month: May 2021

~A universally relatable devotional, written by the truly beautiful Ashley Lande. (To visit her iridescent blog, click here: ttps://www.ashleylande.com/. I highly recommend signing up for her newsletters, you will be blessed !)

I recently read an aging supermodel’s post wherein she lamented becoming “invisible” at her age as her sex appeal has diminished. The hashtag “sexy has no expiration date” capped her elegy for youth, for attention, for both lustful & envious stares.

Is “sexy” really the highest to which we can aspire in the pantheon of human qualities, the top metric for womanly value, such that we should hang on to it doggedly even as it recedes farther and farther away, like the retreating creep of a hairline?

I kinda hope sexy does have an expiration date. I don’t really like the word at all. Much of my life it’s been a burden, a term freighted with both dire importance and impossible demands.

By fourteen I’d developed matronly hips and could be seen slouching sullenly in photos in a vain attempt to shrink my 5’9″ frame, which carried 20 extra lbs. When I finally “bloomed” 4 or 5 years later, the newfound prowess of attractiveness was an intoxicating drug, laced with danger and power.

My exterior may have garnered male attention at last, but inside I was still the same girl who watched all her friends drift away with boys at the dance while she hunched over in the corner and tried to figure out something to do with her too-long arms and tried not to cry. Ah, memories 

Heartbreak and ruin ensued as I tried to magnify the “sexy” part of me, the part that was adored, the part that moved units and lured gazes. I hushed all the other parts, tamped them down unkindly.

I’d been indoctrinated by the world. “Sexy” was my paramount value. Without it, I was less than nothing. With it, I was invincible. So I thought. So Satan says.

But what is sexy? Sexy is cheap, profligate, ubiquitous. It screams from magazine covers, it hisses from store displays. You can be anything you want, the world cries, but you better be sexy while you’re doing it.

Sexy floats, for a time. It can even seem to fill you, for a time. But as a young woman, when the stagnant pall of despair set in and the very non-sexy parts of me demanded their reckoning, I learned it is a cold, cold comfort.

Now that I think of it, sexy definitely does have an expiration date: meeting Jesus.

Jesus doesn’t care if you are sexy. Jesus doesn’t care if you’ve outworn all your usefulness on society’s terms. Jesus doesn’t care if your skin is taut or crepey. Sexy has absolutely no currency with him. And that’s what both drew me magnetically in and filled me with terror.

This capital that I’d learned the dirty art of leveraging – this was trash to him. It meant nothing. I was naked before him, truly naked, and there was nothing sexy about it.

I was known without reserve, every part, even the decidedly unsexy ones where my worst fears festered, foremost that I would be met with disgust. There was no more hiding, no more withholding. It is a fearful and wonderful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Because here, too, in the nakedness and trembling vulnerability of standing before blinding, dwarfing, stultifying holiness, here too was the miracle: I was loved without measure.

It still whispers and hisses and sometimes yells, the lie: you must be sexy, or else you won’t be anything at all. I hear it in the posh waiting room of a plastic surgeon where I go to get Botox shot into my jaw for the intermittently severe TMD I’ve lived with for years. Apparently my jaw takes upon itself all the stress and tension that might otherwise be evenly distributed in my body. After expensive dental work, many episodes of debilitating pain, a thousand chiropractic visits and fifteen gazillion doses of ibuprofen later, I am not inclined to look upon its noble sacrifice charitably.

He probes my masseter muscles with a finger, the doctor who is surprisingly down to earth and has not made any comments on how I might surgically enhance any other members of my body, as Steven had feared he would. He injects the botulinum toxin A with a tiny needle. I barely feel it.

In the next few days as I wait for my evil jaw muscles to slowly enter partial paralysis, I assess my face with a more critical eye. There is definitely a faint cleft developing between my eyebrows. My lips are less full than they once were. I got the Botox for legitimate medical reasons, yes. But maybe just a filler here, a relaxer there…

Steven says no. I play it coy, wait a few days, try a few more angles of asking. He looks me in the eye: NO. You’re beautiful the way you are.

I sigh. How easy it is to forget, to become ensnared by the temptation to play by the world’s rules. Must hang on. Must be sexy at all costs.

But we are bound up in and bound for a kingdom without end where sexy has expired forever and never had any currency to begin with. We are loved wholly and pervasively, from every angle, not only from that which that flatters our features most.

Sexy will expire. It already has. Jesus trampled it, along with every other false and soul-siphoning measure you’ve held yourself against as though it were sacred and not from the pit of hell.

Let it die. Let sexy expire. Real love, the kind you’ve always craved and always looked for in all the wrong places, is here at last. Jesus is here.
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(Btw – I am not judging anyone for having cosmetic procedures. Heck, I wear makeup. I recently bought a moderately expensive face serum. It’s just always good to examine our whys, and remember eternity, and the reality of Jesus’ love).

Again, this beautiful article was not written by me, but by the lovely Ashley Lande. You can visit her inspirational blog by clicking here. Subscribe to her website to receive more of her work directly to your email!