Breaking up with the bad boys

The elderly man chatting with the stunning young woman at the reception desk turned to me and said, “She’s got it all, hasn’t she.” I smiled and nodded. To all outward appearances it seemed she did. Beauty, brains, personality.

But I knew differently. I knew the battle that had been waged behind that dazzling smile. The lies that morphed the slender image in the mirror into a perceived rounded reflection. I knew the years that she, who had turned heads and drawn stares, had lost in the dark rooms of addictions and on the arms of deceptive men.

No one looking at her today would know of the deadly depths she’d seen.

Of the grace one quiet day that reached down and lifted her from the pit.

Of her determination to break that “fit only for a bad boy” image and put on her new creation dress.

We had coffee together one morning. She told me about a man who had asked her out. “He’s successful, rich, not the kind of guy I could get,” she said.

The words hung there in the morning light. A lie exposed. A past agreement of a lie in need of breaking. Not that she needed successful rich, but that she didn’t automatically deserve the bad boy.

It takes time this healing, this renewing of the mind. But the power has been broken: I will restore you to health and I will heal your wounds.—Jer.30:17

She fingered her devotional. “I’m learning not to lean on my own understanding but to trust God in all my ways.”

I love how she applies each little truth, carefully like her morning makeup. It shines through, this new beauty not born of genes or bottles. Sometimes I want to hurry it along, say things like “Just get on with it,” but this God’s project, not mine. I want to align myself with what he is doing here.

I think of a verse once prayed in desperate hope for her and now answered:

[Her] soul has escaped as a bird out of the snare of the trapper. The snare is broken and [she] has escaped. Our help is in the name of the LORD who made heaven and earth.—Psalm 24

And I bow in thanks to the Lord for answered prayer, for mighty power, for freeing captives, and giving hope to those whose only hope is you.

Dear friends stopping by who love someone ensnared in the lies of body image or addictions, I pray God would give you steadfastness in prayer and hope in his redeeming power to set the captives free.