Monday, November 22, 2010

naked.


Since high school, I’ve gained and loss…and gained again about 40 pounds. I look at my cheerleading uniform hanging in the closet at my mom’s house, and I couldn’t fit a thigh in there if I wanted to. Back then, we were so small! Back then, I was scarcely unaware of who I was also. In the past few years, I’ve grown to embrace everything about myself that I once didn’t find flattering physically and emotionally. It’s a point in my life when I realized I could be exposed, and I had no control over it. Scary and liberating but this is where I found the art of nudity.


When I think of the classic story of Adam & Eve, I feel like we’re cheated out of thinking deeper about their nakedness. There are rare instances in the Bible where they talk about nudity. As I’m dissecting the story, the bliss of Eden and the couple in their nakedness symbolizes so much freedom and pureness. They had nothing to hide because they were in perfection. However, after Eve was induced to lead her husband and herself into deception, they made nakedness a thing to hidden and covered….in Eden? I was curious what made think that in Eden, a place that God created, that they could hide the parts of them that God created? And in my best Chrisette Michele voice: it just came to me…like an epiphany....when God said, “Who told you that you were naked?” (Genesis 3:11)

It’s as if the word had no recognition to God because to Him we are always exposed, so how can man put a word on something that is natural? It is what we are all the time not only when our clothes are off. At a trying period of limbo for me, I realized that I was naked all the time. Not always to people but always to God…always. I was like Adam trying to hide from the world, hide from God and hide from myself. But how silly is it to deny yourself of reality?

EPHIPHANY! Even with the fall of Adam and Eve, God still carries their weight and in turn carries mine.

It’s like I woke up, totally in an Eden mindset that my garments, my heart and my mind are never shielded from God. Because of this realization, I started a journey of rediscovering my first loves beginning with myself. Physically and emotionally naked like never before.

The question I had to pose to myself (that I also encourage of others is): If you’re not comfortable being naked alone, how can you be naked with someone else? And now, I’m totally allowing myself to be freed because sometimes I’m rigid and afraid of exposure. But once God shines a light on you that shows you that you were never hiding…what’s the point of being in the shadows?

And since when do diamonds fit into square pegs?