lovin my flaws

Time check. Its around 11:20am right now and already I am crying. Apparently, my tear ducts know nothing about time and dates or if it's to early or too late for a good outpour of tears.

I was just surfing the web and checking my online accounts when I came across this little site called LoveYourFlawz. I was browsing through the gallery when I started crying. I never knew that looking at a stranger's picture(the one below)

will make me cry. Happy tears they are, mind you. I am just amazed how God in His perfect wisdom made me. Can you believe that, HE MADE ME! I was the product of God's unbelievable imagination, ever fiber of my being were handcrafted by the Maker of the Universe. Max Lucado put it this way,

"What makes us special is not our body but the signature of God on our lives. We are his works of art. We are created in his image to do good deeds." - In the Grip of Grace

Its been 5 months since I unleashed my curls. I have an entire blog entry about that experience and now, I choose to focus writing about the battle that every feminine soul experience. It's a lifelong journey to find one's self and coming to the point of rejoicing in your personhood as God sees you.

Ok, so I never felt beautiful growing up. I was certain that I had MORE flaws than a typical person should have. I had tons of things that I hated about my self.

1. My crinkly, unruly, wild, outrageous and out-of-this-world curls.
2. My airport-sized forehead that could accommodate Airforce 1.
3. My chubby cheeks.
4. My BIG and oddly-shaped eyes.
5. My height(which is quite obvious. I'm a mere 5 foot)
6. My too small ears.

and the list goes on and on and on..

This dissecting thing became an everyday activity that I almost felt as if it was natural to feel or even choose to do it...repeatedly.

Looking different didn't help either. Everybody says that I don't look Filipino at all, and that fact alienated me from my people. I felt like being a foreigner in my own country. Walking along the streets of Manila, I get varied reaction from my fellowmen. Now, because I am a bit (OK, I am a lot) like Christopher Boone, I don't usually understand what exactly they are feeling seeing me but I can tell you that most of them laugh at me. I know that I don't have to care about what they say about me but I can't help feeling affected. On the lighter side, looking foreign has its perks. Be it, being served a larger portion of my food or salesladies and personnels being extra nice, I know that it isn't always a bad thing to look foreign.

My mindset changed when these verse reverberated inside my head while I was seeing the facial expression of a random person one afternoon:

John 15:18-20 (New International Version)

The World Hates the Disciples

¹⁸"If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. ¹⁹If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. ²⁰Remember the words I spoke to you: 'No servant is greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also.

and

Philippians 3:19-21 (New International Version)

¹⁹Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is on earthly things. ²⁰But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, ²¹who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.

Sure, some of you might not refer to my experience as persecution yet what I understood that moment was unimaginably priceless.

For you to understand the gravity of that Eureka! moment, I'll elaborate a little.

So, since I started to go natural with my hair, it drew attention (a lot of them unwanted) to me. Most people try to guess what my real nationality is. I had been mistaken to be of random and unrelated races and nationality that I feel the need to enumerate every one of them. In random order here they are:

1. African-American
2. American
3. Punjabi/Punjaban(people of India)
4. Cherokee
5. Pakistani
6. Lebanese
7. Egyptian
8. Italian
9. Spanish
10. Jamaican
11. Russian(seriously?)
12. Cambodian
13. Thai
14. Indonesian
15. Chinese(this I don't know)
16. Filipino(only one person told me so, and he was the one who asked me if I have chinese blood)

So far, I have fifteen races under my belt. And by now you might have an idea about the weight of my realizations.

Back to regular programming.

It was my I-am-not-of-this-world moment. I was close to falling facedown to praise God when I realized how he intelligently made me. All this time, I believe, it was God's way of reminding me of the truth that I don't belong to this world. My people thinks I am foreign and the rest of the world thinks I am foreign as well, so where do I really fit in?

dear Aboji, I thank you that you are

reminding me daily that I am not of this world, that my citizenship is in Heaven.

I am grateful that I can experience firsthand what it means, to really feel what it really means.

I love you, and I belong to you wholly.

loving herself,

Queen <3