I was talking to a friend the other day who said she grew up ultra skinny. She told me she deals with the same types of problems being skinny as I do being fat. She said, “To be incredibly skinny is just as much of a heartache as being heavy.” I was surprised to hear this, since all of my life I thought the skinny girls were more favored of God because they have a great metabolism and can wear anything they want. My friend insisted that a skinny girl needs buttons just as much as fat girls do.

It’s funny how often we look at others and desire to be them. To be their size. Their shape. To have their hair. Their nose. Their height. Their gift of style.

As a Roly-Poly Button Girl, it has taken me a very long time to come to terms with this. I was born with extra wide hips, enough of a bottom for two people, and thighs that clap when I walk. The mere scent of food causes me to salivate, and I swear I was given an ice-cream deficiency at birth because I can never seem to get enough of it. But the longer I walk this earth, the more I am convinced that, when my Creator knit me together in my mother’s womb, He carefully and meticulously selected every part of my physical make-up.

If you consider how much thought and planning you put into building a house or remodeling a kitchen, you suddenly realize how very carefully and thoughtfully the Lord of Glory must have chosen every single aspect of your physical appearance.

For example, my friend Valarie recently remodeled her kitchen. She can tell you the differences between granite, Corian, and Formica counter-tops, and a dozen other details about the choices she’s had to make to get the look she wants.

“Some of the decisions were quite agonizing,” she says. “And some were quite simple.”

Valarie took great delight in selecting just the right color, style, and door for her glass front Shaker cabinets. Being a gourmet cook, she is especially proud of her GE stove with a double boil burner and double oven. But there have literally been hundreds of other choices she has made regarding the physical appearance of her new kitchen: The color of the cabinets, the type of handles the cabinets would have, the interior layout of the cabinet drawers, the color and type of floor tile, the lighting fixtures, the size and style of the sink, the layout in general, and on and on and on.

If my friend Valarie, a mere human being, can get that excited and take such intense interest in carefully selecting every detail of her remodeled kitchen, how much more care and attentiveness did our Heavenly Father use in fashioning us?

Now imagine if, after Valarie excitably showed me the pictures of her remodeled kitchen, I criticized how it looked?

After all the hard work and care she put into making it look just right, my guess is that she would be very hurt by my criticisms. And I would not be a very good friend.

I’ve done it myselffor years.

For example, I have despised my silhouette for a very long time.

Let me explain:

I often walk on my lunch break, and since there are so many strip malls near my office, I tend to walk in front of them next to the building where the shade is. The only problem with this is that I can easily see my silhouette as I huff along… a silhouette I am not proud of. To me I look like I have swallowed a barrel. I have an extremely large middle body that protrudes in rotunda fashion over my legs. When I am on a bicycle, I look like an elephant on a tricycle.

Now my over-sized body is not God’s doing. That is mine. But my predisposition to carry extra weight IS His doing. I gain and retain weight easily. Other girls, like my ultra skinny friend I mentioned earlier, have a very hard time gaining any weight at all.

Because the Button Journey isn’t so much about pounds lost or gained, as it is about self-acceptance and coming to terms with who God made us be. He chose me to have thin hair and a very round body. He chose my friend, to have long, thick shiny hair, and a tiny body. And each of us are fashioned exactly as we should be. To God be all glory!