Ten years had come and gone since I had my breast implants put in. I knew I was overdue in making a decision: Should I replace them? Should I take them out? What should I do?

One day, in the middle of a shower, following my heart-and-soul-surgery to eradicate fear, I was overcome with the awareness that God was speaking. He wanted to talk about my breast implants. I would be lying if I said He hadn’t already been talking to me in the years since being “all in”—following his call to start Revelation Wellness. In the quiet of my heart, I would boldly wonder what it would be like to just be me again, to be everything I encourage you all to be.

Fear would not let me wonder for long. Yes, you can bet the enemy loved accusing me of being a hypocrite—talking about freedom and love being greater than fear—but not really walking in it when it came to my own private, hidden life. I just kept minimizing the issue and excusing it. Bottom line…I wasn’t willing to do anything about them because I was afraid.

There it was…fear.

There was no way around it. God was onto something. He was answering my prayers to take out anything in me that didn’t belong. As the warm water ran down my back, revelation flooded me like a fire hose.

Beauty is God-given. Pretty is earned. Beauty can not be stolen because it’s inherently planted deep in one’s soul- as an image-bearer of God – guarded by the Angel Army of God, where time and exposure to the elements of life cause beauty to blossom. Pretty gets stolen because it’s based on things that are temporal, unguarded, and are located on the surface – a place where time and exposure cause decay. Beauty is inspired by love. Pretty is driven by fear. 

God was showing me that I had made this decision to “enhance” myself predicated solely on fear and fear alone. Initially, I called it love and freedom, but it became clear that these things I let inside of me were altars for worshipping fear. Fear was my warden when I entered the prison of “pretty” and willingly went under the knife to “enhance” my life. The prison of pretty is easy to enter and hard to leave. 

Fifteen years ago God did not leave me nor forsake me, but he allowed me to choose fear over love. At that time, He knew I wasn’t capable of choosing more. He was not going to give up on me. His love for me is non-negotiable. If it meant allowing me to bring a security blanket along for the journey, He was kind enough to let me do so. Never did He shame me for it—only the enemy did that.

My heart raced and I knew this was it. The jig was up. I had been caught by love and covered by grace. Like a gentleman, He was presenting this to me as an option—a beautiful, gold-leafed, royal invitation to more love and less fear. He was answering my prayers in a way I did not see coming.

“Would you be willing to let me have them now?”

As I stood in that shower, aware of His presence, with an awareness of my fear, I wrestled. And I wrestled hard. I came face to face with all my doubts and fears attached to the artificial bags inside of me. These were the greatest fears that swirled and surged through my mind:

• Will I still feel like a woman?
• Will my husband still find me sexy and beautiful?
• How deformed will I look?
• What will people think of me? Especially my friends who have them?
• How are we going to pay for this?

At the end of the longest shower of my life—true to how God has wired me—I threw my hands up in the air and literally said out loud, “Okay God. FINE! IF this is what it’s going to take, then you are going to have to do ALL of it! From beginning to end, this has to be all you, all your power and all your ability, because there is nothing, NOTHING in me that is able to do this. I will say yes, but you have to do all the work!”

My eyes were pierced by His eyes of fire and love as I pleaded for Him to do what I could not do. Some of my most pivotal life changes have been marked by these holy, grab-God-by-the-shirt-collar kind of moments. And this was no different.

I stepped out of the shower keenly aware that so much was about to change.

First things, first. What was my husband going to say?