Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty

The buzz generated by the six Dove women is telling. The advertising agency has spent years destroying the self esteem of females everywhere and to think that Dove and these six women have the audacity to show pictures of themselves in their underwear with curves and all is, well, a breath of fresh air.

The human body is beautiful and yet very few women ever think of themselves as beautiful. Insecurity encouraged and perpetuated by images of women unhealthily skinny in every add from Michelob Light to Victoria's Secret, is an epidemic in our society because society has tried to tell us that skinny is healthy. Even men are now having complexes when their stomach isn't washboard tight.

Dove falls short in one area, however. The girls they chose are beautiful but the only beauty we can see is their bodies. We are making value judgments based on how they look. It is a step in the right direction but still feeds our obsession with our bodies--an obsession that somehow makes us feel less at home in the crude matter called flesh.

But our bodies are part of us, part of our identity and part of our reflection of the image of God. The obsession we have with our bodies is an incredible detriment to who God created us to be. Girls are dying around the country due to anorexia all because of an obsession with how bad they believe their bodies look.

We must remember we are more than our bodies. That is to say our value as a person, as a child of God made in his image, is not based on how we look but on who we are in our very essence as a person. Someday we will receive new bodies to live eternally with Christ Jesus. In that some day we will mirror Jesus (1 John 3). But in mirroring him I do not believe we will look as he looks. If you are females you won't look like a male. But our hearts, character, minds and bodies...the whole person will be reconciled to God and the whole community of God's people. Together, as a community, we will look like him...perfected.