Breasts....

There's a lot of talk on the news at the moment about faulty breast implants. I heard on the radio today that there is no complete register of all procedures carried out because women didn't want their details kept by clinics. I confess to being baffled.
I just don't get it. I completely fail to understand people putting themselves through any surgery for cosmetic reasons. There are lots of things I don't like about my body but personally I can't imagine going through that pain and uncertainty to put them right. Perhaps I'm a coward. Perhaps I have no idea how desperate some women, and increasingly men, are to change those parts of themselves they don't like.

Or perhaps, rather than undergo unnecessary surgery to conform to an image of ourselves that is - bottom line-  fake, we might encourage one another to be brave enough to learn to love ourselves just as we are, and to reject the pressure to become (impossibly) ever younger-looking and more beautiful.
God made us and loves us as we are, and there is nothing wrong (and everything right) in making the most of these bodies he has given us. But to take this to the extreme where women have discovered that they have jeopardised their health in pursuit of a perfectly-sculpted unnatural figure makes me very sad. I  worry about our culture's saturation with pictures of beautiful women with amazing figures. And I worry that the women who seek to emulate them do so furtively, and want to be anonymous even to the clinics which carry out the procedures.
I hope that the greatest gift I can give to my own children, perhaps especially my daughter is self-acceptance.
I hope she, and I can both make the most of who we are - without the help of a surgeon.