The Idol in the Mirror

Lately Pamela Anderson has been all over the internet, in beautiful gowns, arriving at different events and galas. If you’re from the 90s like me, you know all about Pamela Anderson and her appeal, but she’s getting attention now for a very different reason: she’s stopped wearing makeup. She’s getting all dressed up for exclusive celebrity events that others spend the whole day getting ready for, and she’s walking the red carpet bare-faced. It’s some sort of acceptance and embracing of her age, according to her interviews. When she was a guest on Drew Barrymore’s show recently, Drew chose not to wear makeup as a showing of solidarity with this “brave” movement that Pamela Anderson has now started.

It’s an interesting choice to make in this era of middle-aged women trying so desperately to look like they’re 30 years younger. The pressure on aging women is enormous, and something about Pamela’s rebellious act of tossing out all of that trying too hard has struck a chord.

I used to think that young women who were obssessed with their beauty and their sex appeal were the real idolators. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that the true temptation to idolatry is not when you like what you see in the mirror. It’s when you don’t like what you see. No one is more obssessed than a woman who feels unattractive. On many days it’s all she thinks about. None of that good, noble, right, or lovely thinking is in a woman’s mind when she is struggling with the image she sees as she stands before her reflection every morning.

When a woman is preoccupied with bad feelings about her face, hair, and body, so many better spiritual thoughts get crowded right out of her mind and heart. In fact, it can be difficult for her to even remember the basic, obvious truth that her worth isn’t rooted in her good looks or her youth. How is she then going to fulfill her role as a Christ-focused, mature, self-controlled spiritual leader among the women in her church?

Paul wrote to Titus and implored him to have older women teach younger women. What did he want these older women to teach? “What is good.” Maybe it has always been difficult to recognize what is good, but as a woman in today’s world, it seems especially hard. All of the ads on Instagram seem to shout that refusing to look your age is good. Celebrity photos with headlines that read, “Unrecognizable” because a woman has gained weight in middle age clutter my Facebook. It’s good to be thin. The messaging is loud and clear. It’s good to not be menopausal. It’s good to have youthful, round, pink cheeks on a perfectly made up face. It’s good to have eyes that show no signs of laughing and smiling for 50 years. So much of the ways that the loud voices of this world speak to and about older women is just terrible thinking wrapped up in advice about what’s good.

And as much as we don’t want to be, Christian women are influenced by these voices, and we lose spiritual focus so that we can use all of our brain space to worry about the state of our wrinkles or the way that our shape has changed or the bags under our eyes. Satan would love nothing more than to see us distracted by our reflections so that our hearts aren’t in the work that the Bible says we should be doing. We will find great joy and satisfaction in teaching younger women what is truly good. We will only reach new levels of despair if we continue to gaze into our mirrors, desperately searching for the cure to aging.

Creams are great. Botox, exercise programs, diets, supplements, and all sorts of other things can have a place in a Christian woman’s life without ruining her spiritually. But we can’t teach other women how to be self-controlled and joyful and at peace if our own hearts are in constant turmoil, hating our physical appearance. It isn’t a virtue to despise the face and body that God gave us. It only causes us to set up a mirror in our hearts so we can gaze at what we hate and bow at its altar.

It’s so easy to lose our perspective, to begin to value physical beauty over spiritual things. Even if we never struggled in this area when we were young, it can very easily creep up on us as we grow older. We are even tempted to feel that our value has diminished over time. The Bible tells a completely different story. It talks about the treasure of old age, about wisdom that comes with experience, about the great worth of older women in the church who will teach and lead by example. Appearance is not a gauge of how useful we are to God’s kingdom.

Older women, let’s embrace our role as the spiritual mothers and grandmothers of the church. We can use that wrinkle cream, but let’s not despise the lines on our faces. In God’s kingdom, those lines should be evidence of a spiritual adventure where Jesus has grown us and changed us and given us wisdom and taught us what is truly good. This is what’s worth passing down to younger women. We can teach them that they don’t have to fear growing old, that it, too, is part of the adventure of learning to rely on Jesus and trust His perfect plan.

Let us decide that we will let the aging process further mold us into the likeness of Jesus. We have two options here: we can hate our older selves to the point that we are of little spiritual use, or we can love what God is teaching us in these later years and look for the joys of not being 25 years old anymore. When we seek His face more than gazing at our own, He will fill us with what is good. And we can pass it on.