Picture Perfect Problems

If a picture is worth a thousand words then a misleading picture is a very harmful thing indeed.  What if the picture in question is an out and out lie presented as the truth?  Even more dangerous.

I have been aware that the people we see on magazine covers in the grocery store checkout lines are tweaked a bit.  I never really thought too much about it though until recently when I have seen several videos about the level of tweaking that goes on.  The end result (probably in more cases than not) is a flawless version of the person that showed up to the photo shoot.  Sad and scary.

Why am I writing about this?  Because I know that there are many women (and men) out there that base their expectations for themselves on these false images.  This will only lead to disappointment and/or depression based on a falsehood.  How tragic that there are women out there depressed that they can’t be the woman in the picture when the woman in the picture isn’t even real.

And even though many know this, they still buy into it.  Why do you think there is such a market for beauty products and fad diets? A quick Google search told me that approximately 100 billion is spent worldwide on beauty products, and that doesn’t even include cosmetic surgery.

The consumer isn’t the only one affected.  I would wager that the models on magazine covers must have severe self esteem issues.  They (supposedly being the most beautiful people) still need some photoshopping even after all the makeup, hair artists, and personal trainers get through with them.  Even they aren’t beautiful enough.  They must see themselves on a magazine cover and think, just like every other woman, “I wish I looked like the woman on the cover.”   So many people wish this but they don’t realize that the models themselves must wish it too.  And yet everyone buys the products and the diets trying to achieve the impossible: beauty that can only be achieved through a computer.  Beauty that isn’t real.

It frustrates me to no end that there are people out there telling my wife that she needs to try harder because she doesn’t look like the fake person on the cover of a magazine.

So, the question I always come to at the end of one of these posts is what do we do about it?  The images won’t stop coming.  The best answer I can give is to find affirmation in another place.

The pictures we see attest to the fact that we, as humans, want to see perfection.  We are trying to find it or give representation to it.  The truth is that we will never find it on our own.  We will always come up short.  We will always be able to look in the mirror and see fault.  But if we have this desire for the perfect and we can’t achieve it in ourselves where do we look?  To Christ.  He is perfection and promises us a future where He has perfected us if we will come to Him.  That perfection won’t come here and now on this earth, but it will come.

Why come to Christ and what does that look like?  When God created us He required that we honor him with our lives by living up to the standard He set.  Just like we can’t obtain the perfection provided by Photoshop we couldn’t live up to God’s standard so  He required payment instead.  Death is that payment.  So in our imperfection the only thing we can expect is death, and not just physical death, but spiritual death as well.

Fortunately, God had another plan.  He required payment in death and He sent Christ to die in our place as a perfect sacrifice on the cross so that if we accept that sacrifice and follow Him, God would pass over our sin and not require that spiritual death from us.  In essence he would Photoshop Jesus in over us. Good news, right?

One last thing to keep in mind: whose eyes are we trying to be perfect for?  The only one that matters is the God who created us.  And if we have come to Christ then God doesn’t see the imperfect us.  He sees Christ in our place.  And I can’t think of anything more beautiful.