Dignity

During the summer of 1998 girlish pigtails, crop tops, and baggy cargo pants were all the rage. A 16 year old Britney Spears burst onto the scene singing her nasally pop tunes, enchanting tweens and teens everywhere with her tiny bare waist and seductive pout. I was 10 and I thought she must be the epitome of adult femininity. She appeared to have it all. If I wanted to be a cool, desirable, talented woman like her I’d have to dress and act accordingly. Looking back, I thank God for blessing me with parents who forbade such dress and behavior. They guided me through the appeal of that fad and taught me the value of dignity. Here we are, 16 years later and look at the Princess of Pop now - not so glamorous.

Proverbs 31:25 describes the virtuous woman as one who is “clothed with strength and dignity; she can laugh at the days to come.” She is not swooned away by her latest crush and passing fads. She is stable. She sees beyond the temporary and prepares for the future.

“Dignity” defined by Merriam-Webster.com is, “the quality or state of being worthy, honored, or esteemed.”  A dignified woman has poise and class. She is self-controlled, kind, and gracious, serving those around her before thinking of herself. A dignified woman is free to have a light heart and contagious laugh because she is not consumed with the self-worship that culture encourages.

Flip through the self-help magazines at the check-out stand or watch one hour of Oprah-esk talk shows and our culture's resounding message will be clear: 

“You come first! If you don’t love you the most, no one will love you at all! Be the best you that you can be! Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!” 

It’s all selfishness and it’s growing ugliness within many of our culture’s young ladies.

When I was eight years old I bought my first diary. Over the years I have filled about six thick journals with my evolving thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Every last crush is recorded in my sloppy handwriting throughout those pages. Sometimes I open them up and have to chuckle at myself! Why in the world did I take such pettiness so seriously? I liked so many different boys and participated in so much needless drama. I was obsessed with making myself prettier and skinnier and happier.  It was silly and immature. To my comfort, those pages are private and can easily be disposed of or ignored until I need another good laugh.

Girls these days don’t have diaries. Today’s girls have Facebook and on Facebook they are as honest and intimate in the recording of their thoughts, feelings, and experiences as I was in my private journals. In ten years from now when these girls have grown and matured they won’t have a bookshelf full of old diaries to read and reminisce through; they will have every personal detail of every day of their adolescence recorded on the world wide web for the rest of time. They will then have to somehow cope with the knowledge that what they now recognize as petty and embarrassing has been seen and likely laughed at by hundreds of their social network “friends.” Even worse, some of these girls will grow into women who still treat the Internet as their own emotional dumping ground. Dignity will still escape them.

The selfishness that women in our culture are encouraged to possess is nothing new. It goes as far back as the Garden of Eden when the serpent played on Eve’s selfish nature. He tricked her into thinking that God was holding out on her. If she wanted to be the best she could be she’d have to go about it her own way, even if it was in direct disobedience to the Father. She did it her own way and ultimately she died.

The lie is that by serving ourselves first, we’ll somehow be filled up enough to then be free to serve others. However, we are never enough by our own measurement. As a result, we will never be done thinking about ourselves to be freed from ourselves to finally have the freedom to think of others.

Jesus exemplified the opposite. He lived on Earth in human form to become the Servant of all. He came with a paradox: if you want to be the greatest, make yourself the least. First love your Heavenly Father with all that you are and then love others as yourself. Do not worry about yourself because He cares for you. When we surrender to Christ, we let go of our worries and trust Him to supply our every need. He liberates us from the distraction of self-interest, freeing us up to be used by Him in caring for others. He transforms us into women who are worthy of honor and esteem.

Jesus Christ is the Source of true, enduring dignity and every woman fully given to Him wears it as clothing; she is strong as she laughs without worry over tomorrow.

"Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies." 

- Proverbs 31:10

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind....Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no greater commandment than these." 

- Mark 12:30-31

Sanctified and Surrendered by Caitlin Marie Stacy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.