Love, Service, Yoga Pants, and Spandex

Today I read a random article here on Buzzfeed about a Christian woman who decided to stop wearing yoga pants and leggings as pants.  More specifically, she decided not to wear them out of the house in order to honor the truth that her backside is for her husband's enjoyment and not for that of every guy on the street.  Also contributing to her decision was a good desire to try not to entice men to lust after her body, which is not for them to enjoy in the flesh or in their fleshly imaginations.  It seemed to me like a pretty non-controversial and cool decision.  Nevertheless, according to the article I read, her decision has people falling all over themselves with shrill objections.  The comments section following the article was oozing with self-righteous disgust for her decision and especially for her going public with it.  This surprised me and got me thinking.  As I considered the dynamic behind the angry response, I was reminded of an issue I have been wanting to write about.  So here we go: Love, service, yoga pants, and spandex. 

The Bible teaches us that Jesus came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.  This is the heart of love: disadvantaging ourselves in order to advantage another.  Dying, so that others may live.  This is beautiful, and it is what Jesus did for us.  He is teaching and shaping his people to imperfectly imitate him in it.  

When we learn and practice this in our families, churches, and neighborhoods it is beautiful.  This happens as we learn to rest in Jesus' loving sacrifice for us, and our hearts are captured by it to the extent that they are transformed into some small living approximation of it.  But sometimes we get this all confused and turned around.  We read that Christ came to serve, and that we are to love one another, and we start looking around at specific ways in which others need to serve and sacrifice for us.  We get a feeling of entitlement to be served by all, and don't feel a compulsion to sacrifice for and serve others.  This gets applied in all sorts of ways, and all of them are ugly.

The spandex situation shows that not only do we struggle to love as we ought, but many even struggle to see this kind of love as a good or beautiful thing at all.

The girl who quit wearing yoga pants and spandex did it with at least three goals in mind.  One was to honor her husband by not taking her body, which belongs to him (as his belongs to her), and flaunt it before other men.  The other was to do her best to help other men not to lust after her.  The third which underlies both of those is to honor her God through love.

The underlying goal is to delight so much in God's love for her in Christ that she looks for ways to imitate it in her life.

The first goal seems clearly motivated by imitating that love for her husband.  She wants to honor him.  She wants to make it clear that her body is exclusively for his enjoyment.  She is limiting her clothing choices in order to honor her husband, to show him how exclusively loved he is by her.  Her concern is not her "right" to wear spandex.  Her concern is for the good of her husband.  Her concern is to honor Christ by loving others for his sake.  Beautiful.

The second goal seems clearly motivated by imitating the love of Christ for others.  She knows that lust is destructive to people's souls, that burning for another man's wife is an expression of self-centered desire to use another person for their own pleasure (the opposite of love).  So she limits her clothing choices in order to help sinful men.  Her concern is not first for her "right" to rock her tight pants around town, but her concern is first for the purity of people she doesn't even know.  Beautiful.

This is not an expression of her slavery to others.  This is an expression of her freedom to love others because she has been loved by Christ.

So why all the hate?  Why the accusations of "slut-shaming?"  Accusations which themselves could be labeled "love-shaming."  People can't see the beauty of her decision to love others, because they can only see entitlement as good.  They want her to insist on her right to wear whatever she wants.  They want her to insist on her own way, not knowing that "love... does not insist on its own way."  They are furious that she would take responsibility for the lust of other men, not understanding that she does so not because she feels guilty for it, but because she genuinely loves them and wants their good.     

But it isn't true that this is just a problem for the haters in the blog comments.  This is a problem for all of us.  We all get to feeling entitled.  We all get to thinking that others should sacrifice for us.  This is primarily because we forget that God already has sacrificed everything for us when we absolutely did not deserve it.  If you trust in Christ, you have been sacrificed for; loved so perfectly that you are free from demanding the sacrifice of others.  You are free to sacrifice yourself for others, even if the watching world doesn't like it.

Where do you struggle with this?  Where do you need to remember that you have already been perfectly loved and served?  Where can you love today?