Monica Teske, the writer of this article, is a very strong Christian lady, and I really appreciate her writing today's article. She made some very excellent points, :)
If I came up to you
and I was wearing my Batman t-shirt, if you paid any attention to my
shirt, you could probably tell that I am a Batman fan. If I were to
come up to you in a shirt that said “GAP” you could reasonably
infer that I shop at GAP and that is where I bought that shirt. As
you saw me again and again, day after day, you would be able to
figure out several different things about me. We can tell a lot about
people by their clothing even though sometimes they may not realize
what they are telling us by their clothing. In my example, in just a
matter of two days, you figured out that I was a Batman fan and that
I like to shop at GAP without me even uttering a single word. Whether
or not we realize it, the clothes that we wear tell others a story
about us.
Suppose for a second
that I walked past you and I was wearing a pair of shorts that said
“cute” on the rear end. What does that phrase and its placement
on my shorts tell you about me? As females, we may not be as “in
tune” as males may be to know what that tells others about us. But,
to say this as kindly as I know how, yet bluntly enough to not be
misunderstood, those shorts tell others that we have a “cute”
rear end and that is absolutely not a story that we need to be
telling ANYONE! Now, please do not misunderstand me at all, I may not
be consciously sending out these messages by my clothing choices, but
I am sending them out anyways. My clothes are telling people stories
that I probably never even thought about before. Yet, my ignorance of
the perceptions of me that people are getting from what clothes I put
on does not give me a defense for what I’m wearing. I shouldn’t
be wearing that type of stuff as a Christian woman and I have no
legitimate excuse when I do.
Let’s revisit, for
a moment, the example of those shorts. Not only do those shorts say
something I do not want to be saying as a Christian, but they also
bring attention to an area of my body that does not need to be
brought to anyone’s attention. Ladies, males are attracted to women
because that is how God made them. As a result, guys notice our
physical beauty a lot. Guys are going to think that you are pretty,
but you have a lot of control over where they look and what parts of
you they think are pretty. So then, we should not be drawing
attention to places where we would not want guys to look! If you do
not want a guy commenting on the beauty of your body, then don’t
show it off! Don’t let them see it! Don’t draw any unnecessary
attention to it!
As Christian women,
we need to be very conscious of what story our clothes are telling
others. We need to watch what we wear in order to ensure that it is
modest, but we also need to watch what we wear to make sure we are
not drawing attention to inappropriate places or saying not very nice
things about ourselves through our clothing. The question then to ask
yourself is this: “What story are my clothes telling others about
me?” Are they telling others that I do not care to show off my
body? Are they telling others that I am a modest person? So next time
you go to your closet to grab some clothes to wear, honestly consider
the question “What story are my clothes telling about me?”
