The Dress

It was camp time, and I, as usual, didn’t have much money for the fancy evening clothes that most people my age would be wearing. Looking through the thrift stores, I found one dress. It met all the requirements: 3/4 sleeves, mid calf, not too fitted, high necked. It was a beautiful antique green-gray with a cream background, and it fit me perfectly.

Since having been kicked out of my previous church because my former pastor “felt in his spirit” that I was “lusting after” him, I hadn’t felt like looking very pretty. I had started, in my mid 20s,  dressing in bulky dress jumpers a size or two too large, in dull or dark colors. This wasn’t modesty, though I didn’t know it then. It was humiliation and depression and a very unhealthy body image.

I wanted to look pretty in a way, but I was also very embarrassed about looking good. Wasn’t that immodest? Would I look sexy? I never wanted to be accused of causing a man to lust again. But I also wanted to look attractive. I saw other women my age at church. They didn’t dress like I did, and they weren’t accused. They were admired. And then I found the dress.

I questioned whether I should buy it. It looked absolutely great on me… and I wasn’t sure if that was great or terrible. But I loved it so much and I loved the way I looked in it. So I bought it. And the last night of camp, I wore it. I was a little self conscious in it, because I knew I looked good, but worried that it showed my figure more than my bulky jumpers, but I was also very happy with it. And so I shouted through the Friday night service and went back home the next day, very happy with my week.

And then came Sunday morning. The pastor’s wife taught our Sunday School class, and that morning she dedicated the class time to discussing how someone in the class had worn something terrible on Friday night. It was too fitted. It showed way too much. The person who wore it should have worn a girdle. She was so embarrassed for her…. For me. I was a size 6-8. I was 20-something with no kids. I’d never married. And the dress, apparently, though she never named me, was bad. I never wore the dress again.

Looking back now, I have to wonder what her problem was. I wasn’t dressed badly. I actually was dressed more like everyone else than I’d been in several years. I met all the rules of the dress code. Did she pick up on my self consciousness and exploit it? Was she jealous? Or was it just pure spite? If she was really embarrassed for me, if she really cared, wouldn’t she have come to me privately and expressed her concern, rather than spending Sunday morning detailing her embarrassment of the unnamed person to the class? (And wouldn’t she have done the same for whoever it was, if it wasn’t me?)

I wonder these thing now, looking back. I recently lost weight and needed new clothes. The ones I had were so large they were falling off of me. And every time I go to try on clothes that really fit, I think of that dress from nearly 20 years ago, when I was condemned for feeling pretty.

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Author: Through Grace

I was raised in a somewhat unhealthy church group within the Nondenominational Christian Church. After graduating high school, I began attending a United Pentecostal Church (UPC). I've been a member of four UPC churches and visited many others. Of the four of which I was a member, I was "encouraged" not to leave the first and then later sent to the second; attended the second where an usher repeatedly attempted to touch me and the pastor told me I should not care about the standards of the organization and was wrong to do so; ran to a third at that point, which threw me out after a couple years; and walked out of a fourth. For these transfers and because I refused to gossip about my former churches, some called me a "wandering star, a cloud without water" (Jude 1:12). I love the fact that when the blind man was healed, questioned by the Pharisees and temple rulers, and expelled from the temple, Jesus went and sought him out. He very rarely did this once someone was healed, but for this man, he did. I believe God has a special place in his heart for those who are abused, wrongfully accused, or condemned by religious leadership. I believe He loves those who are wronged by churchianity--yes, churchianity, not Christianity, because those who do these wrongs follow a church, not Christ. 1 John 4:7-8 7 Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. 8 He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. 9 In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. 10 Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.

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