Testimony
Since I was young I was always told I was fat. It didn’t help that my mom, brother and sister were skinny. I was always said to look like my dad who was well,
When I was growing up, I dreaded Chinese New Year. My aunts and uncles would never fail to tell me how fat I have grown in the past year and none of my cousins were fat. They were all skinny and pretty and I was never one of them. The comments did not cease as I grew older and I remember once when I was 18 or so, I was at my aunt’s house for steamboat with my cousins and some other relatives, I was eating when my aunt said “Shu Ling, I think you better stop eating” and then compared and told me how her daughter had managed to lose weight.
In school, I would always get comments like “eh? You’re Chen Hua’s/Shu Wen’s sister? But you don’t look alike!” reason being I was fat and they were skinny. They however had no problem identifying that Shu Wen was Chen Hua’s sister or Chen Hua was Shu Wen’s brother.
Even strangers never failed to tell me how different I looked from my family. Once I was with my mom and sister buying socks at one of the stalls at the night market and the aunty asked my mom if we were her daughters. Then she mentioned how my sister looks like my mom and I didn’t and then proceeded to ask me if I always ate my sister’s food (which was not true because my sister and she usually ate 2 and a half bowls of rice but yet she was never fat)
My mom was always telling me how I have to stop eating and lose weight, how other people had successfully lost weight through certain ways and means. And when I had decided to diet and told her, she would just pour cold water all over me saying “Aihya, you won’t last one lah.”
I was brought up that way and so I had a very low self confidence. I would never step out and do something when asked to volunteer or strike up a conversation with people I have just met. I always thought I have to conform and make other people like me in order to have friends and be accepted. To different people I will say different things and act differently in order to be in their good books. I just wanted to have that sense that I belonged but I never really felt that at the end of the day when I went home and was alone. I felt worthless.
I remember there were times when I cried myself to sleep, hating how I looked and at the same time hating how I hated myself because I knew it wasn’t God’s plan to have us hate ourselves. God has always said that he made us perfect and whole, beautiful in His eyes and yet that point of my life I just couldn’t bring myself to believe how I could be beautiful when I didn’t feel it. Those nights that I cried myself to sleep I cried to God, asking him to help me change my looks so that I would feel more self worth. Obviously God didn’t make me skinny because he knew that beauty would never help me regain confidence and beauty was a short-lived thing.
When I came to Australia, I still had that low self confidence and wouldn’t easily talk to others. However I thank God that he blessed me with friends where I could really be who I wanted to be without being afraid of being judged. The real change came when I attended the church’s “Vibrant Women” session in uni. After listening to how women are made by God and what God had intended for us, they also touched about how we always think we have to be beautiful in order to be accepted but it’s not true. The session just spoke to me so much that during alter call as I was worshiping, I felt like I was in this huge white room and the there was no obstacle and only one route down to the alter. I felt that I had to do this and there was this urge to go down. As I was being prayed for, I cried a lot and that feeling of self-worthlessness and low self confidence just faded away. This time I knew for sure that God loved me for who I am and I am not worthless in His eyes, or anyone else. Ever since then, that feeling of self-worthlessness has never come back.
I just want to close with a verse that I like from Luke 12: 22-34. That passage of scripture is titled “Do Not Worry”.
²² “Then Jesus said to his disciples: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. ²³ Life is more than food, and the body more than clothes.”
*just thought I'd post this...my testimony for life group on 5/10/07*
When I was growing up, I dreaded Chinese New Year. My aunts and uncles would never fail to tell me how fat I have grown in the past year and none of my cousins were fat. They were all skinny and pretty and I was never one of them. The comments did not cease as I grew older and I remember once when I was 18 or so, I was at my aunt’s house for steamboat with my cousins and some other relatives, I was eating when my aunt said “Shu Ling, I think you better stop eating” and then compared and told me how her daughter had managed to lose weight.
In school, I would always get comments like “eh? You’re Chen Hua’s/Shu Wen’s sister? But you don’t look alike!” reason being I was fat and they were skinny. They however had no problem identifying that Shu Wen was Chen Hua’s sister or Chen Hua was Shu Wen’s brother.
Even strangers never failed to tell me how different I looked from my family. Once I was with my mom and sister buying socks at one of the stalls at the night market and the aunty asked my mom if we were her daughters. Then she mentioned how my sister looks like my mom and I didn’t and then proceeded to ask me if I always ate my sister’s food (which was not true because my sister and she usually ate 2 and a half bowls of rice but yet she was never fat)
My mom was always telling me how I have to stop eating and lose weight, how other people had successfully lost weight through certain ways and means. And when I had decided to diet and told her, she would just pour cold water all over me saying “Aihya, you won’t last one lah.”
I was brought up that way and so I had a very low self confidence. I would never step out and do something when asked to volunteer or strike up a conversation with people I have just met. I always thought I have to conform and make other people like me in order to have friends and be accepted. To different people I will say different things and act differently in order to be in their good books. I just wanted to have that sense that I belonged but I never really felt that at the end of the day when I went home and was alone. I felt worthless.
I remember there were times when I cried myself to sleep, hating how I looked and at the same time hating how I hated myself because I knew it wasn’t God’s plan to have us hate ourselves. God has always said that he made us perfect and whole, beautiful in His eyes and yet that point of my life I just couldn’t bring myself to believe how I could be beautiful when I didn’t feel it. Those nights that I cried myself to sleep I cried to God, asking him to help me change my looks so that I would feel more self worth. Obviously God didn’t make me skinny because he knew that beauty would never help me regain confidence and beauty was a short-lived thing.
When I came to Australia, I still had that low self confidence and wouldn’t easily talk to others. However I thank God that he blessed me with friends where I could really be who I wanted to be without being afraid of being judged. The real change came when I attended the church’s “Vibrant Women” session in uni. After listening to how women are made by God and what God had intended for us, they also touched about how we always think we have to be beautiful in order to be accepted but it’s not true. The session just spoke to me so much that during alter call as I was worshiping, I felt like I was in this huge white room and the there was no obstacle and only one route down to the alter. I felt that I had to do this and there was this urge to go down. As I was being prayed for, I cried a lot and that feeling of self-worthlessness and low self confidence just faded away. This time I knew for sure that God loved me for who I am and I am not worthless in His eyes, or anyone else. Ever since then, that feeling of self-worthlessness has never come back.
I just want to close with a verse that I like from Luke 12: 22-34. That passage of scripture is titled “Do Not Worry”.
²² “Then Jesus said to his disciples: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. ²³ Life is more than food, and the body more than clothes.”
*just thought I'd post this...my testimony for life group on 5/10/07*
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