Plus-Sized Pin Up

When I was little, my mother started reading me The Chronicles of Narnia every night before bed. We never made it through the whole series -- I think because our house burned. I have reread the first two books in the series, but haven't read any of there others. The one thing that really stayed in my memory was the story of Eustace in Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Flipping through my Bible study book, I noticed that she mentions Eustace and his circumstances. It all came back to the fore front of my mind, and it got me really thinking and analyzing things.

Eustace is the cousin of the original children in Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. When we first meet Eustace, many people do not like his attitude. He ends up wandering away and finding a dragon and his gold. Through different circumstances, he ends up becoming the dragon. It changes how he sees the world and helps him gain friends. However, one night Aslan comes to see him. The Lion shows him a bubbling body of water. Eustace hurries to climb into the water. Aslan stops him and says he needs to remove his clothes first. After three times of pulling the scales from his body, Eustace always finds himself a scaled dragon once again. Aslan must remove the scales. The process of removing his clothing was deeply, deeply painful for Eustace to endure. Once he was done, however, Aslan puts him into the spring. He eventually stays as a boy and gets healed.

This story really got me thinking. What is my dragon skin? What am I hiding behind? I try to pull off my scales and follow God, but they continue to come back. Acceptance, diets, weight loss, beauty, etc. are all a form of the dragon scales. God needs to rip away all of these lies I believe. Eustace became used to his circumstances; however, he was so much more than that. At some level, he did learn things as a dragon, but that was not who he was. I think that I have my dragon-periods in which I learn, but then it becomes easier to hide behind it. People didn't like me before, so it is easy for me to be the "fat girl." God wants to take that away from me.

Geneen Roth says it more eloquently than I could:

Diets are based on the unspoken fear that you are a madwoman, a food terrorist, a lunatic. Eventually you will destroy all that you love and so you need to be stopped. The promise of a diet is not only that you will have a different body; it is that in having a different body, you will have a different life. If you hate yourself enough, you will love yourself. It you torture yourself enough, you will become a peaceful, relaxed human being . . . We treat our bodies as if they are the enemy and the only acceptable outcome is annihilation . . . We continue to believe that with a little more self-disgust, we'll prevail. -- Women, Food and God

I try and I try to pull all these self imposed/cultural imposed things about myself. Change is needed, but I cannot do it myself. As Roth says, I only end up doing the negative in order to make a positive. Well, it works in math, doesn't it? Unfortunately, two wrongs will not make a right. I end up abusing myself, chastising myself, hurting myself, denying love given to me because these scales won't come off. No matter how many times I pull them off my body, I find that they are still there. It takes God to pull the actual skin away to show me something new and beautiful. Only after that can I be healed.