For Sarah, "beauty is in the flaw." She tells me about a rather painful adolescence: "I used to get made fun of ... my hair ... in junior high ... people would draw pictures and stick them to my locker. And my voice was the biggest deal. In the seventh grade, my choir teacher told me, 'Sarah, you're sticking out!' It all comes out ... the beauty is in the flaw -- the things that set us apart that are unique and our features that are sometimes made fun of. I mean, Cindy Crawford got made fun of ... that mole ... "
As a young girl, Sarah taped up a picture of Cindy Crawford on her mirror to try and copy her makeup because she thought they had the same coloring. We laugh about that, until I suggest the possibility that there might be a young girl somewhere out there with a picture of Sarah Kelly taped up on her mirror doing the same thing. And she stops laughing. She's never considered it. All at once, Sarah sounds flustered and somewhat panicked at the possibility, "That's everything I don't stand for. I mean, my gosh, look at me, I'm a mess. If you're going to do that, pick someone better. I look at myself, and I think of everything that's wrong. I do not think I'm drop-dead gorgeous. I don't think I'm pretty to be honest with you."
Sarah tells me that the first thing she sees in the mirror is an "abnormal amount of lines under my eyes." Somebody pointed out these lines when she was 12-years-old, and now that's all she sees. "I've come through so much and I'm still standing and I love Jesus with all my heart. Those lines should be more like a testimony instead of something I'm trying to cover up," she explains.
Soul Cages
As someone who has battled with eating disorders, Rebecca Barlow understands what can happen when your body becomes not a temple, but a prison of your own making. "I grew up in the church. I was a pastor's kid, and I think I began feeling this pressure in my life of having to be perfect." She struggled with anorexia, then bulimia and finally excessive exercise, " ... just anything to make me feel better about myself." After so many empty attempts at filling the void, she came to the end of herself. "I was lying on my bathroom floor, and I was like, 'God, I pretty much want to die today. I don't know if You can fix me. I don't even know if You're real ... but would You forgive me for destroying my body?' At that moment I felt Him in that room holding me and saying, 'Rebecca, you are destroying what I have made beautiful' ... and it was like my eyes were open."
Do those demons still rear their ugly heads? Is recovering from an eating disorder in such an image-driven industry a little like being a recovering alcoholic and hanging out in a bar all the time? "I realize I'm always going to be in a battle, and it's easy for me to fall back into that pit," she adds. She names her relationship with her mom and her Bible as critical "guard rails."
How has BarlowGirl navigated the tricky waters of being imaged as Christian artists? A disastrous first photo shoot that resulted in the firing of the photographer and a decision to start over entirely was one of the best things that could have happened to them. Rebecca describes the tension between initially agreeing to being airbrushed and "stretched out" to look skinnier and the realization that "this is not God-honoring." "We were like, 'Wait a minute ... we're talking about not conforming and yet we're doing exactly what everyone else is doing. We had to re-shoot-dressing ourselves, doing our own hair and our own makeup-the very first one."