Hi everyone is Leslie Rudy host of the Set-A-Part-Grel podcast biblical encouragement for women of all ages.

Today we're continuing in our series on feminine beauty and we're going to talk specifically

on the right way to quote be yourself because that is such a trendy phrase that we're

hearing everywhere from Disney songs to cereal boxes to youth group pep talks we're

hearing that we need to be ourselves and even in

women's Bible studies so much of it is often built around here's how you can learn

to be yourself and I think a lot of this is rooted in the self-esteem issues that women in our

culture struggle with. I mentioned in a previous episode on Beauty how our culture lifts up a literally impossible standard for physical

beauty that so many women feel that they need to somehow achieve and yet it's not even

based on reality. It's based on plastic it's it's based on plastic surgery it's based on

digitally altered and airbrashed models in the computer and women are trying to

achieve this impossible standard and as a result many women struggle with very low self-esteem

and constantly feeling inferior and really God's answer to low self-esteem is

very different than what our culture or even what the church

often thinks the answer is supposed to be.

I begin to hear a lot about self-esteem when I was in youth group about 13 or 14 years old and I remember one of the very

first lessons on self-esteem it all had to do with learning to be yourself.

We were meeting in a youth leader's home, a young woman who was leading a girls group, and we were

talking specifically about low self-esteem and how to feel good about ourselves and how to learn how to be ourselves.

And the youth leader was very well meaning.

She spent a lot of time condemning the media for putting such unhealthy expectations

on us, teen girls, and philosophizing about all the dangers of the

...