why you really do matter: An Anthem for Women

The gorgeous woman that had stood up there on stage with the microphone?

Yeah, she hikes up the side of her shirt to show the whole crowd of us how her white thigh spills thick over the elasticized waist of her pants.

And I’m sitting there wanting to know what Jesus thinks of women.

“I’ve been rejected all of my life because of my size.”

That’s what she says at this gathering of women I was once at.

The singer holds her milk white thigh right there and she’s vulnerable thin to the front row and to those at the back  and I look down at my feet.

She’s standing on a stage and she’s holding out her bare roll of skin, a bearing of soul, holding out her cellulite.

She’s begging us to look in her eyes and why are we looking away?

There are thousands of women there were sitting under this roof holding out their hearts like empty cups.

They were right next to me — all these women rejected for the size of their pants, the size of their house, the size of their family, the size of their callings, the size of their work.

Women brushed off because they live too large or they live too small, because there is more of them than people know what to do with.

Because they can’t or don’t or they won’t fit into someone else’s box.

Women who can’t make their faith just fit thin into their heads and these skinny lines of dry bullet points, but let their God-life roll over into their outed closets and messy stories.

Women who don’t only fit into these categories — mommy blogger, size small, housewife, single career woman, mother, retiree — because they are women made in the image of God and they are more. than. only. this.

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