The Beauty Doctor and Gospel Centered Parenting

My family currently has health insurance through a local Michigan company that operates its own Family Medicine centers. Basically it means that we all (me, my wife, and my two youngins) go to the same place for all of our medical needs. We’ve been with them for over two years and there are a number of things I like about the family-practice model, some things that I don’t but that’s not what this post is about.

Our doctor’s office building is home to a number of different facilities for various medical services, for the most part, it is a one-stop-shop for basic medical needs. In our two years with them, we’ve really only spent time in four areas of the center (listed in order of amount of time spent, greatest to least): the doctor’s offices (including the waiting area), the pharmacy, the play area , and radiology (for various, pregnancy-related ultrasounds).

The Beauty Doctor

Situated between the doctor’s offices and the pharmacy is offices for one of the specialists. Since most of our visits involve both seeing a doctor and visiting the pharmacy, we walk through their waiting area all the time. Want to know what it is?

The Center for Aesthetics.

That’s what it’s called. And if you haven’t had your coffee yet and don’t get what it is, let me explain it better: it’s the plastic surgery offices.

I have mixed feelings about plastic surgery. I don’t think it’s inherently bad or solely exists to profit off people’s vanities. Plastic surgeons who do reconstructive work often are a tremendous blessing to their patients: restoring corporeal functionality, reducing the risk of long term health complications, saving people from enduring shame by correcting birth defects. I know of a specific ministry in China that shares the love of Christ through performing reconstructive surgery for children in remote villages with cleft-palates. Plastic surgery is neither inherently good or inherently evil. It is, as they say, what it is.

But the vanity side exists, and that’s what the Center of Aesthetics is about. Everything about their waiting room exudes vanity, from their selection of magazines, their attractive women working the desk, the various signs and brochures with sleek and bold fonts that yell loudly at your insecurities with words like: FACE, BREAST, BODY, SKIN. (Man, I can’t wait to see who finds this blog through search now.)

The Unintentional (or maybe it is intentional) Result

What occurred to me as I was dragging my two year old daughter through the waiting area so I could pick up one of our many prescriptions was that a series of simple business decisions by the health plan’s management has numerous repercussions that most people normally wouldn’t think about and unfortunately, even if they did, probably wouldn’t care about. The Center for Aesthetics is a business that needs a place to operate. The owners of the medical facility probably offer a number benefits for being there. They had space between the Family Practice and the pharmacy. It’s win-win.

But think about this, because of the age of our children, we as partents spend a lot of time explaining the context of the things that we do. When we go to the doctor, we tell our daughter why we’re going, what the doctor does, what will happen while we’re there, what will happen as a result of what the doctor does. This is how we teach our children about the world.

I realized the other day that, from this perspective we are teaching our daughter these things:
What does a doctor do? Makes people better.
Why do people need to get better? They are sick, something is not right with their body.
You go to the doctor because something is not right with you.

So what is my daughter learning about the world when we go to the health center and she sees that there is a doctor for your health AND s a doctor for your beauty? If one doctor, the one we go to, makes you healthy, doesn’t it stand to reason that the other doctor’s job is to make you beautiful?

The Lies the World Teaches My Children

Am I over thinking this? Probably.

I know that despite my best efforts, I can not stop the barrage of negative impressions that our culture will make upon my kids. But I’m still going to try. I’m their dad. It is glorious responsibility I’ve been given. I love them, so I’m going to do something about it.

So what to do? I believe there are four things we need to do, not just for our kids, but in general as a people called to love the world’s inhabitants without loving the world.

Four Things We Must Do As Parents

1. See the world through different eyes

We all interpret the world against the background of our own values, experiences, and beliefs. As you get older, the things of this world become more and more “natural” and we cease to “see” most of what is before our eyes.

But children see the world through different eyes. They don’t have context to understand most of what they experience yet, let alone the ability to anticipate how they are being affected by it. I’ve written before how kingdom strategists need to look at things from different angles in order to anticipate that which is might not be obvious.

As parents, we must see the world as our kids see it and use our own experiences and especially our knowledge of the kingdom of God to help them to appropriately identify how what they experience will draw them further away from God.

2. Filter

I know that I can not keep my kids from being exposed to all of the negative things of this world. As much as I desire to protect their innocence, I know that there is just too much hurt and pain and sin in this world to be able to do so. I also know that I will damage them more if they grow up sheltered because they will not be prepared to handle the reality of the world whenever they eventually encounter it.

So instead we must filter the negative aspects as much as we can. That mean knowing how your kids may be exposed to it, minimizing their exposure, and being prepared to address negativity with the Gospel.

Since we have insufficient resources to give everything our kids are exposed to the Gospel treatment, filtering is like spiritual triage: quickly prioritizing how critical something is in terms of it’s impact on our kid’s spiritual well-being in order to know how to appropriately treat it.

I’ll give you an example. My kids go to an in-home daycare run by a Christian woman. While there our kids sing Christian songs, pray, and talk about God (along with all the normal kid-things: yelling, playing, going potty, eating, napping, etc.). They also do things that I’m not 100 percent confident in, like watching TV or playing with Barbies.

Instead of pulling them out of daycare, I make a point to filter these things in order to limit the negative impact of their exposure. As a result, we don’t watch TV with the kids at nights or on the weekends. I make a point of talking to my daughter about Barbie telling her that Barbie is just a toy and that God did not create people to look like that. To me, these filters help to identify and address the subtle lies of this world that seek to distort how my kids see themselves.

3. Expose the lies

The third thing we need to do as parents is to expose the lies of Satan and the world. Left unaddressed, my daughter could grow up with believing the subtle lie that she is not beautiful but a doctor can make her so. That lies is a seed that have been planted in her heart. It could take root and grow into a weed that chokes out the life-giving truth that is Jesus Christ. I see that this could happen, she does not. She doesn’t know any better… she’s two.

I must make a point to open her eyes to these things. There is a reason why Satan hides his lies in inconspicuous places, he does not want us to see them. He wants them obscured in darkness, that way they are free to do their life-stealing work. It is my job as a dad to shine a light upon the lies.

4. Reveal the truth

That light is the Gospel. That light is the truth of who God is, who we are as His creation and because of sin we aren’t working the way we should be, and what He is doing to set it right through the life, death, and resurrection of His Son Jesus Christ.

The truth of the Gospel is that no human doctor can make my daughter beautiful. She already is beautiful. Her beauty is the precious gift of the Creator of the entire universe who loves her so intimately and so perfectly that it makes my love for her seem completely meaningless. And I’m okay with that.

The truth of the Gospel is that whatever may be wrong with her is not the result of physical shortcomings that can be corrected by the things of this world. Her shortcomings are the result of sin and disease and they will have no power over her if she believes that Jesus Christ died for her.

The truth of the Gospel is that her body will run down and ultimately fail her. But she will be given a new body, one so healthy, so beautiful that nothing in this world could ever compare.

The truth of the Gospel is that this world, all the good and the bad in it (even her father who treasures her in ways that even he doesn’t comprehend), has no claim over her. She does not belong to this world… and for that I’m glad.

For in the truth of the Gospel we are set free, we are made beautiful, we are redeemed and restored to God. And Satan is fighting very very hard, overtly and covertly, to keep that from happening.

We need to open our eyes and see the things around us that are eroding our efforts to advance the kingdom of God. How about you? What subtle lies exist around you that aren’t immediately obvious?