The Ghost of Clothing Past

"Even a child is known by his actions, by whether his conduct is pure and right."
--Proverbs 20:11

"When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me."
--1 Corinthians 13:11

"Brothers, stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults."
--1 Corinthians 14:20

"I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion."
--Henry David Thoreau

Me, circa 1990, dressed in hand-me-downs except for my Payless boots!

As a little girl, I loved to wear girly clothes. I always had a dress on, no matter whether I was baking with my mom or digging in the sandbox with my brother. The picture above shows me around age 7, wearing my full skirt and my favorite (and first) pair of high-heeled boots in a pumpkin patch! Everyone else in the picture had on their sweats, flannel shirts, and tennis shoes, but that's not how I rolled, evidently. I was also extremely modest. I remember one time in preschool I cried because I had hung upside down on the jungle gym and a boy told me he saw my belly button.

Then came public school, television, and eventually fashion magazines. My femininity basically remained intact, but my modesty all but went out the window. Now, if you were to ask my friends, they would say I dressed more conservatively than most people around me. When I look back at what I wore, though, this doesn't really say much. The older I get, the more I learn from other people, and the more God reveals His heart to me, the more convicted I become about dressing more modestly again. As Paul wrote, we should be like infants in regard to evil--I should be happy and it should please the Lord to want this change.

But wait! There's more. The other part of Paul's exhortation is to think like adults. I have a feeling he wasn't thinking about clothing when he wrote this, but it can apply anyhow. While my pumpkin patch outfit has the right "intent", it doesn't quite match or work with the situation. This is an example of where I should have used grown-up, intelligent thought! At least some flat shoes would have been easier to walk in, though I could have kept the skirt ;)

This is only the first in a series of pictures that I hope to write about. I think there are important lessons to learn from our past, and since I'm writing about style, I'm going to try to glean those lessons from my own previous outfits. Pumpkin patch outfit lessons learned:

1. Don't wear heels in a pumpkin patch. AKA dress appropriately for the situation!
2. I was going to say, match, but how about: Don't match. Oh, how little children care of what others think of them. We lose so much of that as we get older. If red, turqoise, hot pink, and white with two shades of denim make you happy, go for it. It's not a sin.