Image-obsession

“When it comes to tip toeing the paper thin line between inspiration and making you feel like trash, Instagram is #1” - Christina Guan

I love Instagram. It’s one of my favourite places to go on my phone when I’ve got a spare moment. I post something to my grid or story at least daily – yet the quote above resonates with me strongly.

What goes through your head as you consider posting something? How am I going to take this photo to make it look as perfect as possible? What filters and effects can I add? What should I say in my caption? Which hashtags are going to draw the most views? How many likes will I get?

Insta is definitely not the only guilty party. Our obsession with image and appearance aren’t so much internet problems as human problems, but apps like Instagram and Pinterest turn the dial up on these issues. These apps show us beautiful things and inspire us but, when we compare ourselves with what we see in other people’s posts, they can also leave us feeling like we’re coming up short. We can leave feeling so much worse than when we arrived.

The fault isn’t with beauty itself. Genesis tells us that God made this world, and he made it beautiful. At every stage during creation in Genesis 1, God sees what he has made and declares it ‘good.’ In Genesis 2, we get a much more detailed description of what this beautiful world. We’re told that: the Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground – trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food.

God cares about beauty.

Our problem is that, as with everything that God made, we take things and twist them. Beauty should cause us to praise and worship and thank our Creator. Yet so often we turn away from him and worship beautiful things instead. We think we’ll find happiness and satisfaction if we can only make ourselves a thinner or more beautiful – or if only we owned those shoes, or that car, or went on holiday to that place that we saw in someone else’s post. In reality, none of them can ever bring us the satisfaction that we desire. They’re not supposed to.

We forget that God is the source of goodness and light and life and joy.

The Lord looks at the heart

It’s not that God doesn’t care about beauty - he’s invented it! - it’s just that, as with everything, his ways are bigger and better than ours. Consider how God speaks to the prophet Samuel about David, years before he becomes the king of Israel:

Do not consider his appearance…The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart. (1 Samuel 16:7)

God can see more than just our outward appearance, and the most important thing for him is the state of our hearts. It’s not that he doesn't care about the outside, but the thing he cares about most is our hearts.

Indeed, he sent Jesus to die for us, so we might be made new: given new hearts, and a new perspective.

Which means that we are called to still hang out on Instagram and Pinterest. We can still post pictures of a beautiful sunset, or our best friends, or our amazing culinary efforts and enjoy them – yet we are called and enabled to see them from a new perspective: as things that point us to Jesus, which cause us to thank and praise him.

Sometime we’re still going to get twisted and turned in on ourselves, because we’re still dealing with the frustrations of living in this mixed up and broken world, with our mixed up and broken bodies. When you find yourself doing that, stop and take a moment, and ask for God’s help to reshape your perspective to be more like his. Ask him to help you see things as he sees them. Ask him to help you worship him, rather than the stuff around you. And pray that he’d give you opportunities to speak about him and his goodness, in order that your friends also might come and find their hope and satisfaction in him.