You walked into the party
Like you were walking on to a yacht
Your hat strategically dipped below one eye
Your scarf, it was apricot (I never knew that line)
You had one eye on the mirror...
-Carly Simon
Last night I watched my daughter sit on the couch trying to capture the perfect selfie. She was having a little trouble. What I observed was a pattern. She would cock her head, just so, flashing a brilliant smile and then she'd click. Then she'd check her selfie and grimace, unsatisfied. Then she'd repeat. She grew disturbed. The funny thing is, she pretty much kept doing the same thing, but couldn't understand why the results were the same.
(...doing the same thing and expecting different results)
Isn't that the definition of insanity or something?
My older daughter could write the book on selfies. She knows about angles, filters and natural light. If you're her friend on Instagram, you know she's pretty proud of her selfies, even the old "duck face" ones that I consistently tried to convince her are ridiculous. I think those are gone though, thank goodness. They've been replaced with the "fish gape" face. You can't make this stuff up. 
Me? I've never taken one. Well, scratch that. I think I've tried taking a selfie. It's just that if I have, you certainly couldn't prove it. Anytime I have tried, I've deleted the sucker before anybody else could see it. I only know two angles. One makes my chin look huge, the other makes my forehead huge...think Megamind.
You think it's my age?
All I know is that when I was my girl's age, I can't imagine that I would have been a selfie queen then either, even if I'd had the luxury of a phone and those special Snapchat filters.
When I was their age, I hid from the camera. I think many of us did even if we'd spent two hours mastering Bop magazine worthy hair with the use of Rave Extra Hold Hairspray. What was the psychology of that?
...I'll tell you.
Even if we weren't "selfie stars" or masters at strutting our stuff, many of us were still obsessed with
- The way we looked
- The way we perceived others felt about how we looked.
Did anybody else have a stage where they obsessively "checked themself out" in every mirror and at every. single. window, but dreaded the thought of someone capturing a candid pose of you? Every year I dreaded school pictures and the day when yearbooks came out. The nonsense.
- The constant thinking that you look good and want other people to have the opportunity to be reminded that you look good is unhealthy. (Take that, selfie queens).
- The overthinking on your appearance (to the point of having a complex), that you aren't pretty enough/thin enough/youthful enough is unhealthy.
Where did we get the idea that our appearance (and people's thoughts on it) is of such importance?
Yeah, I know. The world tells us. But I thought we were smarter than that. The world lies.
It wishes that we'd waste our time focusing on our own beauty, or the deception that we're not beautiful. It wishes that we'd fret and spend time and money trying to convince others that we're pretty. That way, in our obsession, we're distracted from all the beauty that God has placed in us like purity and unselfishness. We're distracted from the beauty he's placed around us in sunrises, and in people beating cancer and through a weed that (against the odds) pushes its way through the sidewalk.
If insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results, then I'm teaching my girls to be insane.
The madness has to stop.
If we're not content with our own beauty, how can we teach our daughters to be simply delighted in their own?
Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as elaborate hairstyles and the wearing of gold jewelry or fine clothes {or selfies thereof}. Rather, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.
1 Peter 3:4