One size fits all dress. One size fits all birth plan. One size fits all vacation. One size fits all marriage or church or values or trajectory or pet or parenting style or hair color or friendship. One size fits all life, compartmentalized in a box, tidy, and tied with a ribbon.
One size fits all sounds easier somehow. As if all of these single size offerings might be slipped on with the ease of a knee-skimming kimono that looks just right on every body type. Unless you’re 5’2 or male or prefer tailored pieces. Maybe you dislike kimonos. In this case, one size simply won’t suit, no matter how pretty the packaging.
When my husband and I married, a family friend, Ginny, gifted me with a custom made wedding dress. An accomplished seamstress, she created my wedding dress bespoke to my exact measurements and specifications. Over the course of six months, I chose layers of silk shantung directly from the bolt of fabric, placed the seed pearls and lace overlay in a delicate pattern I created, and made an infinite number of lovely, tiny haberdashery decisions. Ginny brought my vision to life by crafting a dress made with exacting precision, and to this day the intricacy of its beauty stuns me.
During afternoon fittings, I stared at my reflection in front of Ginny’s sewing room mirror as she pieced together a practice dress of muslin to create the perfect pattern and pinned it to my body. As I watched her work, shifting, pinning, readjusting, pinning again, I tried to imagine how my soon-to-be husband and I would piece together a new life a few months later. I was young and inexperienced and unable to imagine anything beyond what I’d seen: well-established lives of middle aged adults with full time jobs and mortgages and older children.
I, on the other hand, was twenty-one years old, finishing my final year in college, and surrounded by friends who wouldn’t marry until many years later. None of the lives reflected back at me seemed to fit my particular situation.
My parents celebrated fifty years of marriage this month, and their obvious enjoyment in one another continues to serve as a beautiful example for me in my own marriage. However, my husband and I came into our relationship with our own unique needs, desires, and personalities. We chose to model the best aspects of my parent’s marriage, but ours looked different because there is no one size fits all to longevity in love. It’s crafted from a million decisions in the context of our own commitment.
We tried to emulate more mature families, but realized over time that we needed to craft our life differently. One size fits all is a myth in life, in marriage, and certainly in dress sizes. It damages our ability to dream of something more or better or unique. For much of my life, I believed this myth to be a prevailing truth. I believed there was one way to look beautiful. One way to create a life. One way to express one’s faith. One way to serve one’s family. One way to parent. One way, one way.
This narrowing of life left little room for individuality or nuance. It perpetuated the idea that we are to experience and express the most important aspects of our lives without thoughtful intention and respect for our myriad differences. Why do we hide our oddball notions, our eccentricities, our desires, our uniqueness?
I have found that a one size fits all approach to life is the path of least resistance. It may work for a time, but not for those who long to run their fingers down a length of silk or slowly stitch together a design of pearl and lace. I’d rather live a one-of-a kind life, carefully pieced together from a pattern that allows for borrowing the best from others, and stitching it to that which is particular to me, thoughtfully re-imagined, with a sense of serendipity.
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In case you missed it:
I’m giving away seven days of readings of my new devotional, By One Spirit, to subscribers for free! Click here to subscribe and receive your free 7 day devotional.
If you’ve already read and enjoyed the excerpt and would like to read more of this short, simple, and scriptural exploration of the Holy Spirit, I’ve created a full digital devotional with an additional month’s worth of readings and a few more photos from my travels abroad. I hope you’ll join me as we discover more about this often-overlooked member of the Trinity.
