Wallflowers are pretty, too...

Have you ever felt so completely out of place that it made you want to cry?

Have you ever been the only one in the group to not receive a compliment on your appearance?

Have you ever been that one girl whose dress came down to her knees and actually had sleeves?

That was me the other night.

I already know that I'm not the most beautiful thing to grace the surface of the earth. I know that I'm quite honestly not that pretty by American standards: I'm "plus-sized," I don't have much of a chest, I refuse to fry my hair to get it perfectly coiffed, I don't wear three tons of makeup, and I'm not too keen on the latest styles and trends (especially the whole leggings as pants thing, but that's a whole other topic). I've slowly decided that the only redeeming quality I possess is my eye color.

Basically, I'm not the American beauty. Never have been. Never will be. And I've known that for a long time now.

So why does it still bother me when I have to go out with a group of "normal" people? Why do I still feel the need to compare myself with those around me? It's a curse of the human mind, and I absolutely hate it.

Here I was, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, about to go to a professional tango show and have a wonderful night, and I was worried about how I looked compared to other people.

I slowly realized reasons as to why I can't compare myself to other people, starting with the things that really shouldn't matter (such as how a size 16 can't compare to a size 2...) and ending where it should have started: God's love.

God honestly doesn't care what I look like or how big I am. He doesn't care if my hair is frizzy or my face is broken out. He loves me anyways, so much so that He thinks I'm worth dying for! He loves me enough to want to spend eternity with me. He loves me so much that nothing in this world is big enough to separate me from His love. And I'm worried about what the girls down the hall think?

In the big picture, physical appearance really doesn't bear much weight at all, does it?

I'd like to say that I'm never going to worry about what I see in the mirror again, but the reality is this struggle isn't over. Because I'm human. It's one of those things that I have to daily crucify in order to focus more and more on Jesus every single moment of my life.

No, I'm not going to be a slob. I'm not going to stop wearing makeup completely and never comb my hair in an effort to completely divorce myself from the stigma of society. That's just kinda stupid.

What I am going to do, though, is stop comparing myself to those around me: the styles they wear, their personal expectations of beauty, their opinions about what I should be doing. They don't matter. Yes, if I ask for your opinion about how I look, I want a genuine response. But I'm going to attempt to let myself get continuously bogged down by the comparisons that my own mind loves to make.

I'm a wallflower. I'm not really much to look at. But I'm pretty, too, in my own special way...because God loves me. I'm His princess, and He never lets me forget it.