The starting gun was shot a long time ago. Probably the day I drew the fridge door wrong on that cardboard box and she told me I had no idea what I was doing.

Don’t you know a fridge door looks like this?

Permanent marker made a black X over my door so hard the tip broke and she showed me the right way.

I cried on my Daddy’s shoulder, in his office beside the boxes of tracts and church planting literature scattered everywhere.

I didn’t know this was a competition. I didn’t know I was loosing until then.

Despite my Daddy’s arms and his assurance that my fridge door was just what it should be, the race had already begun.

My round angles didn’t fit in square holes, which, instead of showing me how silly the striving was, just made me feel like everyone else had a head start.

But round holes or square, we still race, don’t you see?

Even the old ones do it, this comparing of fridge doors. I see it—I’ve done it.

She has a bubbly personality and we wish we could make people laugh like that, but hey, at least I don’t come across like a flirt.

She wears clothes like they are art, every movement grace, and we automatically analyze our outfit and decide she must be a show-off.

Her kids giggle in church and we feel smug because who cares if her house looks like Country Living, at least my kids sit still.

She travels and witnesses as easy as breathing and we feel like spiritual buffoons.

She talks during Sunday school, people tear up, and we spend the next weeks trying to be more “deep”.

We feel either proud, smug, frantic, insecure, or a nasty mix of all four.

We are not safe places.

I feed my hungry insecurities with your talents and you feed yours with mine.

No one ever wins.

Over the last two years, so slowly, so timidly, I’m learning to fall in love with what God says is Esta, and how it’s not a mistake to fight, but a gift to embrace. I still don’t know half of what that means, yet.

But the more I wrestle to find what it is to truly be a woman, the more I hate the lies and what the lies make us do. And the more I see how many of us don’t stop until suddenly we are comparing our grandchildren and the whiteness of our dentures.

I’m pulling out of the race.

I’m pulling out because last week I actually saw what God kept pounding in me the last three months.

How it doesn’t matter.

Esta, would you just listen. Just listen.  It does. not. matter.

How He perfectly places and designs and arranges our hearts to be who we are, and it is HIS doing. Our job—my job—as a woman is only to embrace it and finally move free.

That is all.

Free.

And all the passion can be turned outward and upward, instead of spent on protecting and embellishing and worrying about my identity.

I am not a hidden threat to you—you are not a hidden threat to me.

As I embrace who I am, I am left unencumbered to embrace who you are with passion and abandoned, joy, because you are not a threat, you are a gift.  

We are free and only then do we create a safe place to sit and care for each other.

Your fridge door is beautiful and mine is too.

*This is written from the female half of life. As a guy pointed out to me the other day, guys also do this. I only know this side*