Heather elaborates, "Here I am -- my hair's in a ponytail and I haven't had a shower today and I'm sitting with a broom in my hand. That is more reality than any kind of photo shoot. I'm just in that sloppy mommy phase. You know, I'm tired."

Later in the day, I catch a glance in the mirror of my own greasy ponytail, and it makes me want to hop on a plane and fly to Heather's house and help her sweep. We could be tired together.

Heather reminds me of Solomon's wise and wistful words in Ecclesiastes: "It's all vanity." She takes issue with the abuse of the term 'self-image' these days. "We hear that term so much...that it's all about self, self, self. We live in a me-driven society. Christians shouldn't be thinking about self-image; it's about God image. He set us apart."

Why it Matters

It is no surprise that Sara Groves has valuable insight on the topic of image and authenticity. She references Donald Miller's book Searching for God Knows What, where he conducted an experiment at a Christian bookstore trying to find even one ugly person on the cover of a Christian music CD and was unsuccessful. Donald writes, "I don't mean any of this to say that good-looking people are bad ... I am only saying we are, perhaps, even more obsessed in the church with the stuff culture is obsessed with. We are hardly providing an alternative world view."

Sara, like many others, speaks of the rude awakening for her that just making music wasn't quite enough. "I'm not a real polished person. I grew up as kind of a late-comer on knowing the (fashion) rules of things. Once I started to learn them, I was really self-conscious that I'd been breaking these rules for so long."

A teacher prior to being a recording artist at a major label, Sara wore prairie skirts and Mary Janes to school every day. "I felt this complete collision that what I had been doing was inadequate." She reminisces about the huge fight that she and her husband/manager had over the first photo shoot, "He was just trying to get me to change my look a little bit ... and in a nice way ... as my husband, and there's just no way that conversation was going to go well. Troy called [the label] and said, 'Cancel the flight. She's gone. She's left the house and I don't know where she is.' And I had. I had a long drive, and I just wondered how I was going to survive all these pressures. My first GMA Week, I just about drowned in it. Having to dress for that was ... ugh ... crippling. That first year I was really nervous about looking too old. I already had a job, and was a new mom, and at 25 ... I felt really old."

So how do we strike a balance? "Well, the gospel and marketing have always been uneasy for me and hard to reconcile. That's all the gloss, the marketing. It's hard for me because I feel that, at some level, the audience demands it, and they have an appetite," Sara says. "It's like MSG -- they're so used to eating Doritos because they explode in their mouths."

I wonder to myself if the artists are the ones addicted to the Doritos.