S2S Sisters: “Intentional Modesty: Seeking God's Heart for His Daughters” by Laura Kuruvilla

Lesson Transcript

Our prayer is that you will be filled with the knowledge of His will, strengthened with all might according to His glorious power. So I just want to welcome everyone this afternoon to our platform of Strength to Strength Sisters. This platform, the vision for this platform, is to encourage women to be catalysts in God's kingdom through biblical teaching and testimonies of faithful women. I want to introduce Laura Curvilla today. She has been married to Finney for 16 years, and they have eight lovely children.

She was aspiring to be an English professor, and God had other plans for her life. And Laura is especially passionate to see women set free from the world's expectations of beauty and career. She will speak today on modesty and will talk about some—she'll be talking about some questions, one of which is, why does God want us to be modest? How do we define modesty, and is it defined by our culture? So I'm blessed to know Laura.

I've been very inspired by her life, and I count it a privilege to be living in the same city as she does for a few months. So I'm very much looking forward to this. Some of you may have listened to her share on a modesty panel that's available on YouTube as well. So yes, we are looking forward to hearing her speak. After she speaks, there will be a question and answer period, and we would love if you would share a question or even a testimony, just a few words.

And we would also like if you would turn on your video to do that if possible. You can also share questions through the chat box. So we would love to hear from you. Just please feel relaxed, feel free to speak, to share. I know this can be kind of intimidating to share to people and have it to be recorded, but it's always very encouraging when we hear from others. So I want to pray with Laura before she heads into her talk. So go ahead and join me. Dear Heavenly Father, we come to you this afternoon.

We are so thankful that you hear us. We know you hear us, and we thank you that we are called to be your daughters. And we know that your heart is a Father's heart, and we know how much you want us to live how you want us to live and the joys that will come from that. And we all long for that. We ask that you would be, especially with Laura today as she speaks, give her strength, give her rest, calmness in her spirit. And we ask that you would give her inspiration and passion for her talk today.

Thank you for healing. And you know she's had a hard week. Just help her, Lord, to feel strong and to rely on you. And we know that you will speak through her. Thank you so much for being with us today. And we ask that your spirit be present among us and give wisdom. We ask that you would be with each one on the talk today, to each one listening to this ever after. Just prepare our hearts, O God. Prepare them and make them soft so that the seeds may fall and grow in them and be a blessing.

We just want to commit this into your hands, all this we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Okay, Laura, I'll turn the time over to you. Okay. Thank you so much, Linda. I also feel very blessed to have you living here and to get to know you. So I wanted to share a little bit of my story on this topic in particular so you know who you're hearing from. I grew up in Tennessee in a church that didn't teach anything about modesty. I'd never heard of Anabaptist when I was growing up or really any other conservative church.

The church that I went to didn't even teach the gospel. I had loving parents and siblings, but I was very much in normal American culture. So I watched TV, and I went to public school, and I learned very quickly that being pretty and wearing fashionable clothes were part of being well-liked and popular and later, as an adult, part of being successful. Those were things that I wanted to be. And so from a young age, I sought to have clothes that impressed others.

Even in the fifth grade, I was thinking about brands and what things would impress other people. As time went on, the world's fashions became less and less modest and more and more uncovered. And I went along with that. And I truly didn't know what was wrong with that, and I didn't see anything wrong with it. My oldest brother had become a Christian. He's 10 years older than I am, and he was a Presbyterian minister, still is.

And when I was in my 20s, he approached me, and he told me that I didn't understand how men's minds worked, and I didn't know what messages my clothes were sending, and that he was concerned for me. I thought he was being overprotective, and I ignored him. Being extremely thin is also a part of our culture's definition of beauty. And so I bought into this as well. For three years in my 20s, I was an anorexic. I weighed more than 30 pounds less than I do now.

It wasn't until I was converted at age 25 that—and I began to read the Bible—that I realized that God had a very different plan for his daughters than the one that the world calls women to and the one that I was following. As I learned about biblical modesty and the head covering, I had to make a lot of hard choices and sacrifices. These things hurt. They required a lot of courage to go into my old settings, into school, or walking down the street, dressed differently.

But I also found them to be profoundly freeing and to save so much time and trouble that I had spent worrying about how I looked. Learning about God's plan for modesty has really been an integral part of my conversion and a very visible part of my journey. I also want to preface everything that I say by saying that I am still on a journey. I don't feel like I have arrived at perfection in any sense on this topic.

I still experience temptation to want things that I don't need, and the things that I'm going to say are a challenge to me as well. So first, I want to make four points about biblical modesty today, and I'll give you an outline of those. So the first one is that although the world's definition of modesty is ever-changing, the testimony of the Bible and of older and traditional societies is aligned, and it's unchanging. Second, biblical modesty includes covering our hair.

Third, modesty doesn't just mean modest in covering the body, but also modest in expense. And fourth, the call to modesty comes from God's heart of protection and of love for his daughters. The world's call to fashion, while it looks pretty on the outside, is just Satan's old plan to steal and to kill and to destroy. So first point, although the world's definition of modesty is ever-changing, the testimony of the Bible and older and traditional societies is aligned and unchanging.

When I first learned that the Bible commands women to be modest, I didn't even know exactly what that meant because the world calls many different things modest. Where I'm from, you can be modest in a sleeveless dress and a skirt above your knees as long as it's not too tight and as long as the neckline isn't too low. The definition I grew up with to be immodest is to wear tight clothes that are so tight and necklines so low that probably most of the people here today would consider it indecent.

Moreover, the two classic passages on modesty in the New Testament, 1 Timothy 2:7-9 and 1 Peter 3:3, don't actually give us specifics of what is to be covered. Paul writes, "I desire that the women adorn themselves in modest apparel with propriety and moderation, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or costly clothing, but which is proper for women professing godliness with good works." And Peter writes, "Do not let your adornment be outward, arranging the hair, wearing gold, or putting on fine apparel.

Rather, let it be the hidden person of the heart with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in the sight of God." There are some helpful specifics here. They name gold, pearls, costly clothing, and we'll return to those in a minute. But Peter and Paul don't actually tell us what parts of our body to cover. So where do we get this part of our definition of modesty? I think there are three sources we can use, and interestingly, they all converge to one message.

The first source is nature itself. Common sense and a healthy conscience will let us know that sexually alluring parts of our body should be covered and not emphasized. Covering the chest, not wearing low-cut tops, these are fairly straightforward if we're seeking to be modest.

Paul puts it this way in 1 Corinthians 12:23, "Our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require." The second source is history, and I'll share some pictures here to illustrate what I'm talking about. So I spent a good bit of time over the last few months going through illustrated histories of clothing. It's actually a very interesting topic and task to do.

And I'd heard a lot of people talk about this topic before, "Oh, this is what Chinese people wore for centuries." But it's actually very helpful to look at the pictures yourself and get a sense of what is really true. So there's a general consensus among the older and traditional civilizations of the world of what people wear. Women tend to wear skirts or dresses. Sometimes they wear pants, loose pants under a skirt, as in China or India.

When the clothing is a robe for women and men, women's robes tend to be a little bit longer. Likewise, even when men wore robes, they could wear a form of pants for work or for war. And this was called girding up the loins. That phrase is retained for us in the King James version of the New Testament. And so what this meant was that the man would reach between his legs and pull the back hem of his robe and pull it between his legs and tuck it into his belt. And this would make a form of loose pants.

Interestingly, this is something that women never did. In all these pictures, you'll see that chests are covered, legs are covered. The women's and men's shape is not accented, and often the men's head, the woman's head is covered. This is not to say that there was no immodesty in these earlier societies. Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria, two writers from the early church, both write against the immodesty of their day. However, Paul told us that evil men will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.

And I think this is true of clothing. The history of clothing is a downward path. And these people from earlier societies in general dress far more modestly than the world today. It seems that modesty and covering was then more of a norm and immodesty the exception. Today, we know it's the exact opposite. So I'll show you some pictures. If I can get it to—okay, here we go. So this is a reconstruction of prehistoric clothing.

This is female clothing that was discovered in Jutland, which is modern-day Denmark from 2000 BC. So you can see it's actually not that different from a lot of dresses people would wear today: loose top, long skirt. This is Sumerian clothing from the ancient Near East, the Mesopotamian region. This is a Peloponnesian woman from the 6th century BC. And here you see we have a head covering. This is another Greek woman from the Hellenistic period, so closer to the time of the Bible, of the New Testament.

And again, she has her head covered in a long, loose, draped garment. This is the Empress Theodora. She was the Empress of Byzantium with her husband, Justinian. These mosaics are in Ravenna, Italy, and they're contemporary with her lifetime. So the women are on the right of the picture, and you can see they all have these long, loose garments and head coverings. Interestingly, men at this time also wore robes, which we'll get to because there's a change in that further down the line.

This is the Countess Matilda on the right, again, head covering and a loose garment. And these are men on the left. This one is a bishop. The one in red with the staff is a bishop. Another medieval picture, the one on the right is a woman, and on the left is a man in his robe. This is a 19th-century Japanese female dress. And so this is what I was mentioning about traditional societies, that there are some cultures like India, China, Japan that opened up to the Western influences of fashion much later.

And so they continued to wear their traditional dress even into the more recent centuries. But again, you see very loose, like a long kind of skirt-type garment. And then this is from the Manchu people who are found in Mongolia and northeastern China. And again, very similar form of head covering. And finally, this is the Indian Sawarkamis. This is still worn today. So a long, loose kind of tunic, maybe a short dress with very loose pants underneath.

Hindu women traditionally cover their heads when their husbands are present. And so the shawl could be used as a head covering. And Christian women in India will often use this as their head covering during church, even today. So in the mid-14th century and after in Europe, there's a big change that happens. This is from a secular source. It's called 20,000 Years of Fashion by François Boucher.

And he writes, "The great innovation in Europe after the mid-14th century is the abandonment of the long flowing costume common to both sexes." So what he's saying here is that before 14th-century Europe, both men and women wore some kind of very loose flowing garment. And suddenly there's a change around the middle of the 14th century.

He writes also, "It was then that the fashion designer made his appearance." This was in the form of artists beginning to draw clothes to be actually made into clothes that people would wear, mainly Italian artists. One of them was named Poly Wollo. There were two innovations that met scandalized opposition. And again, this is a totally secular source. This is not a Christian writing, which I find fascinating. So these innovations were the short coat for men with hose and a codpiece and lower necklines for women.

So this is the man's—this is what the man's garment changes to from being that long robe that we saw before. Suddenly, the upper garment breaks off kind of at the hips. And instead of the long robe, he's wearing hose, almost like today's leggings. And then the article of clothing called the codpiece is what's covering his genitalia. And obviously, it's serving to accentuate, not to hide. This is what people wore around the time of Chaucer, of Shakespeare. And it's true that this started more at the court.

So it was more the wealthy people as now that kind of pushed the fashions forward. And then for the women, all of a sudden, you see necklines going way down and chest being exposed for the first time. You're seeing cleavage. So I found this just utterly fascinating that there's such a consensus for most of history of what acceptable clothing is. And all of a sudden, there's a big change.

Honestly, I think since the emergence of greater fashion in the 14th century, immodesty has been in, perhaps with the exception of Puritan England and the Victorian period, where there may have been overreactions. But generally, that's been the case ever since that people continued to be immodest. I'm going to stop sharing for a minute so you don't look at a blank screen. Okay. However, there are still faiths that value modesty besides Christianity. And these tend to converge on roughly similar convictions.

My family went to Israel this summer for a few weeks. And I was daily mistaken for an Orthodox Jew. I kept being shooed to the front of the line, told I didn't have to go through security because everyone thought I was an Orthodox woman because their dress and head coverings and ours are quite similar. Likewise, moderate Muslims often adopt a similar definition of modesty: a long skirt or dress. It's not overly tight and some form of head covering.

Finally, and most importantly, there are passages in the Bible that give us a sense of God's definition of modesty. These are usually not explicit commands, but they still give us an idea of how God views the need for the body to be covered. And I'll note before I get into these that many of them are from the Old Testament. And I think often we miss these because we don't necessarily think of looking to the Old Testament for our standard of modesty.

But if you think about the first-century Christians, a lot of them were Jewish. And so they would have had their sense of modesty informed by what they knew from the Old Covenant. So first, we should note that having your nakedness exposed, and that's a quote from the Old Testament, is a refrain for shame and often a judgment for evil. And it comes up all over the place. If you start looking for that phrase when you read the Old Testament, having your nakedness exposed, it comes up a lot: Ezekiel, Isaiah, Exodus.

So clearly, God has a different mindset than modern America, where I think having your nakedness exposed is totally normal. In Exodus 28, God instructs his people that the priests need to wear linen trousers to cover their nakedness. This is Exodus 28:42. He says, "They shall reach from the waist to the thighs, and these go under a robe." And a few chapters before, directly after the Ten Commandments, God orders his priests not to walk up steps to the altar, again, lest their nakedness be exposed on it.

And so to God, the thigh, it seems like, is a part of nakedness. In Isaiah 47, God describes the judgment of the wicked nation Babylon. And he describes her as a woman being shamed. And through his prophet, God tells her, "Remove your veil, take off the skirt, uncover the thigh. Your nakedness shall be uncovered." So here we see some of the same elements we saw in those historical pictures, but stated negatively as something instead of positively. So the legs should be covered.

And here we also see that God views the public uncovering of a woman's head and hair as shameful. And finally, in Revelation 1:13, when Jesus appears among the lampstands, he's wearing a robe that goes down to his feet. This is clearly not a command that we wear floor-length clothes, but I think it's a beautiful picture. And it's suggestive of what is pleasing to God.

So as I've studied these pictures and the history of clothing, I found it fascinating that for such long periods of history, much of the world agreed on the value of modesty and also on its definition. Finally, this is obviously not a talk on modesty for men, but I do want to note that I also believe men should wear modest clothing. And among young men, there's certainly a trend toward tighter shirts and pants. I think modesty is not solely for women.

Secondly, it may be surprising to some people that modesty includes head covering. Clearly, head covering is also an act of expressing submission to our role in the church and our role in marriage, but it's also a form of modesty. As we saw in those pictures before, women from a variety of cultures, not Christians, including Greek, Indian, Western European, and Chinese, all wore a form of head covering. And again, these people were not Christians. So I'm going to share another few slides here.

So the only surviving ancient Roman novel is called The Golden Ass or The Metamorphoses by Apuleius. It was written in the 2nd century. And Augustine, the early church father who lived in the 4th century, mentions it in his writings.

In this novel, the main character, Apuleius, remarks, "It has always been the prime concern of my life to observe in public the heads and tresses of beautiful women, and then to conjure up the image at home for leisurely enjoyment." This probably sounds very odd to us, but I want you to imagine that someone from 1,000 years from now, if the world were to last that long, came upon the lyrics of an ungodly song from the 21st century or from a men's magazine.

This person could easily discover from such a source what parts of the female body men from our day found alluring. And it's the same with this Roman novel. And as odd as it might seem at first glance, men in the 1st century found women's hair sexually attractive. And again, this may seem very surprising to us. And it's good to ask, was this a quirk of the ancient world or this particular man? Or is it a wider phenomenon?

When Finney and I were first married, we had an interesting conversation with a young man who visited our church. He pointed out that while many, many women, even most women in our world, have very short haircuts, women on magazine covers and grocery store aisles always have long, flowing hair. Look at them the next time you go to the grocery store. Why is that? He suggested that the advertisers and designers of these magazines know something that the rest of us may not be aware of.

And that is that a woman with long, flowing hair is more attractive and sensual to an average man than a woman with short hair or if her hair is put up in a bun. Once he said this to us, it seemed obvious. And now I notice it everywhere. Most ads and billboards that are trying to sell something using a woman's attractiveness as a tool use a woman with long, flowing hair. Does the Bible hint at this anywhere? I think it does in at least two places.

First, as we already saw in Isaiah 47, when Babylon is depicted as a woman who is being shamed, God tells her to remove her veil. So in a culture where modesty is prized, showing a private part of your body publicly is shameful, including your hair. And secondly, I think we see this in 1 Corinthians 11:10. This is a cryptic verse.

Paul writes, "For this reason, the woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head because of the angels." It's important to note that the word "symbol of," which appears in many translations, are not in the Greek, but they're added by editors. And you can always tell this in your Bible because the words that are in italics and these slanted letters are not in the Greek, but they've been added by an editor to make sense of the verse.

Sometimes it's legitimate where you're trying to take a verse from Greek to English and just the differences in language. You need some extra words to make it make sense. But in this case, I think it's unnecessary and actually changes the meaning of the verse. So it's an important thing to look out for. I put the Greek sentence down below for anyone who studied Greek. And this is the literal translation. Because of this, a woman ought to have authority over the head because of the angels.

And over could also be on or upon. So because of this, a woman ought to have authority over the head because of the angels. So the question is, what does it mean to have authority over the head? One helpful practice of biblical interpretation is when you come to a difficult or unclear phrase, find it elsewhere in the Bible in places where it's more clear. New Testament scholar David Garland notes that in every other occurrence of these words, ehusian ehin epi, these words mean to have authority over.

So this is the Greek for that phrase. Ehusian is authority. Ehin is to have, and epi is the preposition, which means upon or over. So to have authority over. He says in every single occurrence in the New Testament besides this one, these words mean to have authority over. So here's the New King James with the symbol of authority, the symbol of in italics. Here's the literal. Here's the Greek. And this is the phrase we're talking about that means to have authority over. Okay, thank you.

So in Mark 2:10, Mark uses this phrase to say that Jesus has authority over sin, to forgive sin. In Revelation 11:6, God's two witnesses have authority over the water to turn it into blood. And it's exactly these words, ehusian ehin epi udatos. In Revelation chapter 14, John uses this same phrase to refer to an angel who has authority over fire. And again, in chapter 16, John uses these three words to describe God himself, who has authority over plagues.

So these are powerful forces that Jesus, God, and the angels have authority over: sin, water, fire, and plagues. And what is the woman to have authority over? Her own head and the hair upon it. In his book, The Veiling of the Virgins, the 3rd century author Tertullian connects this verse to Genesis 6:2.

He says, "The sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them that they chose." Paul has just been writing about the creation narrative in 1 Corinthians 11 when he writes that woman came from man, but that man is not independent from woman. So that's found in Genesis 3. So it's no great leap for Paul or Tertullian to go to Genesis 6 and think of the sons of God.

Tertullian suggests that these sons of God were the fallen angels and that they lusted after human women and had children with them. And if you remember Genesis chapter 6, these are the Nephilim, the men who were mighty on the earth, and it's displeasing to God. So Tertullian's reading of this verse is that the head covering is partially a covering of modesty to protect women from the unwanted gaze and advances of evil angels and men.

Clement of Alexandria, another early church author, similarly writes that this chapter, sorry, that this verse teaches women to cover their heads for the sake of modesty. He, however, is thinking of virtuous men who she will keep from stumbling if she covers this aspect of her beauty. And the reason that Tertullian can be thinking of evil angels and Clement can be thinking of virtuous men is based on this word angelous. This word can mean both angel and messenger.

And so it's used in the Bible to mean an angel, but also a messenger of God and even a person. Often followers of God are called angelous, messenger. And so that's why the ambiguity there of who exactly the woman is covering herself from. But both of these men who were early Christians who spoke the original language saw this verse as teaching that women should choose to cover their heads for the sake of modesty.

So like the power of sin, fire, water, and plagues, the woman's head and hair are a powerful voice, are a powerful force, as we saw both in the quote from the ancient Roman novel and in the story I told about the women on the covers of magazines. Women's hair is powerful. It can draw the admiration and desire of men and even of fallen angels. Paul testifies to this power when he calls the woman's hair her glory.

Again, the New Testament scholar David Garland writes, "The woman is to have authority over her head." That is, she is to exercise control over her head. If she unveils her head, everyone has control over it. And she loses her dignity. Everyone has control over it because they can see it. But when we cover our heads, we take control over who is allowed to look at our glory. Again, it's a form of modesty. I find these verses incredibly empowering. Wearing a head covering is not just a passive act of submission.

It's first and foremost a choice. We choose to put a head covering on. We choose to recognize the power of the beauty God has given women in her hair. We choose to cover that hair from public view, and we choose to take our God-given places in marriage and in the church. So we'll move to the third point, which is that the biblical definition of modesty also includes extravagance. When I think of modesty, I usually think of discreetly covering the parts of the body that can be alluring.

But Paul and Peter's treatment of the subject both focus more on expense and display. These are elements that we must not miss. So as we read these verses, note how many details of these verses are about cost or expenditure.

Paul writes, "I desire therefore that women adorn themselves in modest apparel with propriety and moderation, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or costly clothing, but which is proper for women professing godliness with good works." And Peter writes in the New King James, "Do not let your adornment be merely outward, arranging the hair, wearing gold or putting on fine apparel.

Rather let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is precious in the sight of God." This is another point where the editors have added an unhelpful word. This merely is not in the Greek. It's added by the editors. And if you think about a literal translation, "Do not let your adornment be outward. Rather let it be the hidden person," you can see that that merely actually totally changes the meaning of the verse.

Peter is not saying, "It's okay to have outer adornment as long as you have inner adornment too." Rather, he's saying, "Don't adorn yourself outwardly. Instead, seek inner adornment, the hidden beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit." Moderation, gold, pearls, costly clothing, and fine apparel. All of these terms point to being modest in expenditure, to spending a reasonable, not a large amount of money in attiring ourselves. This idea of moderation dovetails with adornment.

Often when we seek to adorn ourselves, we want more, and we spend more. More dresses, more shoes, more sweaters, more scarves. In its essence, an adornment is something extra. It's something unnecessary. We need shoes to protect our feet. We need a coat or a sweater to keep us warm from the cold. Adornments are those extra elements, those decorative elements that we don't really need.

And I think they're also—I think this verse also speaks to piling on more and more of something, to have a reasonable number of blouses or dresses so that you can wash them and still have a clean one, as opposed to a closet that's crammed full of extra clothes. This is just my supposition, but it seems to me that from the way that Paul and Peter focus on the definition of modesty as expense or show, that this was the greater temptation for women in the 1st century.

From what I've read, it seems that modesty in the New Testament was more often uncovering the hair or wearing finery to show off than it was uncovering private parts of the body. You still see something similar if you visited a Muslim country or seen Muslim women here. I think often you see women who are modestly covered, but they also wear high heels or sport an expensive purse or wear elaborate makeup. So why does God call us to be moderate and modest in the money we spend on clothes?

I think it's because it's a manifestation of loving our neighbor. If we're caught up in buying many clothes, expensive clothes for ourselves, we may forget to think of the people in need around the world, those who are in need of food, in need of clothing, and in need of the gospel. When we spend unnecessary money on ourselves, we're missing an opportunity to share with those in need.

So the question is, when you're shopping or considering buying yourself or making yourself an extra garment, can you see with the eyes of faith those people that are in need and make the choice to help them instead? Why does God call us not to adorn ourselves? I think there the answer is pride, that as we seek to add adorning elements to our clothes, it's out of a desire to be noticed or to be exalted above others.

So my fourth and final point today is that the world's call to fashion, luxury, and extravagance is just another beautifully veiled form of Satan's desire to steal, to kill, and to destroy. God's call to modesty is one of love and protection. Why does God call us to cover our bodies, particularly our legs, chest, figures, and hair? It's not because our bodies are shameful or dirty or must be hidden.

It is because He's made us beautiful and good, and He wants to safeguard us and protect us, either for the sanctity of marriage or for the sanctity of an undistracted single life. The world has one shifting standard of beauty to which all people are supposed to conform. It shifts over the years, but there's always one target that the world is calling women to say, "This is beautiful.

Be like this." But I believe that when God looks at people, what He finds beautiful is the incredible variety that He made, and also the way that every person in that variety bears His image. God loves us, and He wants to protect us from being objectified by the stares or advances of men with lustful intentions. I know now that God saw me as a young girl when I was dressed like the world, and I was wanting the attention and approval of boys, and totally unaware of the heartache that dating would bring.

I know that God saw me spending excessive money on clothes for years, looking to be approved of by the end crowd, and knowing that friendships built on those grounds don't satisfy. And I know that He grieved for me. God sees all the women seeking to live up to the world's beauty and fashion standards, and He wants to free them from that senseless burden. He wants to protect our future and current marriages. He wants to protect the girls and women who are called to be single. Why does God call us to cover our heads?

We have the honor of testifying to the beautiful way in which God made the world, that male and female, and even male leadership and women's submission is a beautiful thing that leads to peace and health and order when it's done in love and with hearts resolved to serve our King.

When we choose to cover the glory that God has given us in our hair, and we submit to our husbands, our fathers, our male leaders in the church, we have the privilege to imitate Jesus, who willingly covered His divine glory to become human and submitted Himself wholeheartedly to the will of the Father, even when it meant death on a cross. God sees each woman who is ashamed of this crown that her King has called her to wear, and He grieves that she is ashamed of Him.

He also sees the women and girls who have turned away from these teachings or who struggle to apply them, maybe because they don't understand why they're in the Bible, maybe because they've been abused by men who teach modesty and head covering, maybe because they don't understand, and it feels just like a restriction. Our Heavenly Father grieves for these things. He longs for each one of us to see Him and His kind and loving heart behind every one of His commands. God's heart for us is so good.

He's not seeking to restrict us from anything that is good. Rather, He knows the freedom that we will find in following His ways. Why does the world want you to wear a short skirt or tight clothing? Why do advertisers want us to feel the need for new clothes every few months? And where does the desire to be cool or admired come from? The world's goal is to make money, but Satan's desire is far more sinister. He desires to entrap and ensnare.

Satan is behind the world's systems, and he delights in every kind of bondage. He knows the misery and self-loathing of women trying to be as beautiful or thin or fashionable as their peers or the models that they've seen in ads, and he enjoys it. Satan delights in our suffering. Why does God want you to be covered and content? It's because He loves you, and He values you. He knows that your worth is far, far beyond and far deeper than your appearance.

And God knows that with the fall, human beauty and youth are destined to fade for every single one of us, and that there is a deeper and truer beauty that will not fade, that incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in the sight of God. God would have us seek this beauty and the peace and assurance that sanctification brings, and to be free from the pursuit of physical beauty with which our world is obsessed.

Not obsessing about your weight or clothing, not worrying about your outfit, not feeling shame for not being as pretty as another woman, contentment with your appearance, and certainty that God looks at you and says, "Good." Freedom to seek God without distraction and temptations. This is true freedom. The world and Satan are the side that would exploit women. They propagate the lie that their ways are freedom and that God is repressive. Our God is the one who truly loves women and who desires our freedom.

So to close, I've tried to convince you of four things today. First, that the world's definition of modesty may change, but that common sense, history, and the Bible all give us one picture of true modesty. Two, that modesty includes covering our hair. Three, that modesty has a second definition of being modest and expense, an expenditure. And four, that God's call to modesty comes from His fatherly heart of love and protection.

If you leave this talk with just one thing, I hope it will be this: a fresh glimpse of your Father's heart for you, His desire for you to be free from the world's rat race of beauty and clothing, that His commands are not about restrictions, but about freedom. Thank you for that, Laura. That was very exciting to me. My heart feels very full, and I think partly because of some of my own experiences in my life. Growing up in a conservative setting, and I'm so grateful for all I've been taught.

I was taught modesty, but I wasn't taught the heart of modesty. I wasn't taught why we needed to be modest, maybe a few details, but not the heart of God. And it has been so exciting for me and life-changing, first of all, to truly know God and to live in the spirit of, "What can I do for my Father?" rather than, "What all do I have to do to get by?" You know, just doing the bare necessities. And I feel like that I am just very humbled by that blessing of knowing that, learning that for myself.

And also one of my favorite points in this talk, and I've heard this previously, and I'll never forget how excited I was about it, to realize that a woman covering her head has the opportunity to imitate Christ, the veiled Christ. And there haven't been very many more things that have excited me more than that. I just love that connection with Christ. It's so beautiful. Anyway, I want to open it up to whoever has a testimony to share or just a few words or a question.

I would just love if everyone would feel very relaxed and comfortable to do that. And you can also share it in the chat box at the bottom of the screen. So go ahead with your questions or thoughts. I think that if we were all totally relaxed sitting in the living room together, we could talk about this all day. So we'd love to hear from you. I'll start out here with a comment that came in on the chat.

And it says, "Thank you so much, Laura, for your time and effort in researching and preparing this talk and for sharing these truths with us. You are such a blessing, and may God continue to bless you and use you further in His kingdom. I have noticed personally that what is modest for my body changes slightly depending on my stage in life, for example, when I am pregnant or nursing and now aging.

And I think it may apply also to different women with different shapes so that what is modest for one woman may not be so for another woman or even the same woman at different stages in her life. For example, a focus on the bust or waistline or hips or hair. Because of this, I think we need to be open to continually seeking God about how we should be covering our bodies because one standard doesn't necessarily cover every woman and at every stage.

I thank God because He is so good in giving us this as a choice to serve Him instead of spelling out exactly what He wants as women to wear. I would be interested to hear from you." Yeah, I think that's a great point. I've noticed the same thing that, yeah, as you gain and lose weight with a pregnancy, for example, or yeah, as you age, that certainly it changes even just for different body types.

And I think that's where we're so blessed to have each other, to have other women in your church or, yeah, sisters that you can go to, also your husband and ask if you're married, ask, you know, "Is this modest? What do you think?" I think it's very helpful to have other people's input. I know Becky had said something when we did a modesty panel at our church a couple of months ago that was really helpful.

She noted that sometimes something looks modest when you're standing right in front of the mirror straight in one position, but then if you sit down or you move around or, you know, it shifts while you're moving around the house and you discover, "Oh, suddenly it's not so modest after all." So that's another thing that can be helpful just to spend a little bit of time in it and make sure that it continues to fit the same way even if you sit or move around. Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

And I do think that there is a quality of the New Testament, I think, that there are a number of things that God doesn't spell out as specifically as you might think.

He doesn't say, you know, "Get a piece of cloth three feet by two feet and tie it in this way in order to wear a head covering." And I think that is because, one, there's a huge variety of people and types of hair and types of bodies, and it wouldn't even work, but also because it allows it both tests our hearts to see what choices we'll make, and it also gives some freedom of expression where it's not just a very, you know, rigid, yeah, rigid standard that we all have to fall into and that there is a lot of

emphasis that's placed on the heart and where it's coming from.

So yeah, I think that's right. And just in responding to what you said, Linda, I would agree. I first heard that idea in a sermon a couple of years ago that we imitate. Actually, it's been more than that, maybe 13 years ago or something, when we wear a head covering that we have the privilege to imitate Jesus. And I think it's such a beautiful—it's such a beautiful picture. And I think it's so like God when He asks us to do something that's humbling to make it also inspiring. Yeah, I love that.

I'll never forget how excited I was about that. And I was going around to people, I was like, "Did you ever hear this before? Like the veiled Christ?" And, you know, a lot of people were like, "Well, no, I don't really think there's a connection here." And then I remember I found a song in one of the hymn books that I grew up singing. It was called The Veiled Christ or The Veiled or The Unveiled. And so I was like, "See, here it is.

It's just beautiful." There's also someone shared on the chat box, "Advice on how to navigate when your husband's idea of modesty is different than yours." Example, "I feel modesty is wearing a head covering, but my husband would not say that. This is my struggle." That's a very hard question. I would love to hear any wisdom from any other sisters on that. I'm not totally sure, honestly, because the head covering clearly is tied in 1 Corinthians with submission to your husband, and yet it's also a command of God.

So that's a very difficult situation. I can imagine that maybe one of the first—and I'm sure you've already done this—one of the first things to do would be to seek God and ask Him to change your husband's heart, that He would support you in that decision. I don't know if you're in a church, but I think also seeking advice or counsel from church leaders or other brothers and sisters in the church would be helpful who know the situation more specifically.

There is—yeah, I can think of two Bible passages that I think connect to this. One would be the—I can't—I'm very bad at remembering passage and verse numbers without—if I don't have it written down in front of me—but the passage where the writer talks about the husband being won by his wife's meek and gracious demeanor, even though he's not a Christian, just by the way that she acts. So I can imagine that applying to that situation.

And I think the other one is in Acts where I think it's John and Peter say to the Jewish leaders, "We must obey God and not man." And so I can imagine maybe ultimately a situation where you would feel the need to obey God and not man. But yeah, it's a very—that's a very hard question. And I would definitely, yeah, seek the counsel of those around you who know the situation. And if anybody else has anything to add on that, I would love to hear it. It's like, yeah, I don't feel fully equipped to answer that.

I don't feel fully equipped at all, even partly equipped. But a thought that I've had already in relation to that is just a question because I've had friends too that, you know, I think have grappled with this is submission. Like, so if a woman is single, who is she submitted to? Like for a single woman, do you know what I mean in relation to being married or single?

Yeah, I think—I mean, my guess would be that I think it's probably to both to church leaders, to her father where it's appropriate, although I think there is an age where, you know, there's not—you probably aren't following your father in day-to-day things as a, you know, older single woman. But I think also to God and to the idea of just the created order, that this is the way God has made things and that you're willingly taking your place in it. So here's two more things from the chat.

One says, "I just exited out of my Amazon cart that had $135 worth of new nursing dresses in it. I really didn't need them. Thank you so much for sharing." And then the second one is—hang on, just one moment. Okay. Could you explain what is the veil of Christ? Yeah, I think the idea is that when Jesus takes on human flesh, He's chosen to cover His divine glory. And it says in Isaiah that He was nothing—I don't have it exactly memorized, but I think it's Isaiah 53. It says that He was nothing special to look at.

He wasn't the most beautiful, most handsome Jewish man that ever walked the planet. He was a very average Jewish man. And that when people looked at Him, they didn't say, "Oh, that must be the Messiah." It wasn't like Solomon where they looked at Him and said, "Oh, look, He's a head taller than everybody else. He must be king." He became a very average human in order to come and save us.

And so that for Him, that veil was covering His—I mean, imagine what Jesus must have looked like in heaven, that divine glory that He had. And we see that even in Revelation when He comes back and His clothes are wider than any fuller can make them. And I think it says His hair is shining. So I think it's covering that divine glory with a very human ordinariness.

And in the same way, we imitate that by the much lesser glory that God has given us in our hair, and we choose to cover that in order to express our submission to God's order. Yeah, and I really appreciate that first comment. That's very humbling. So thank you for sharing that. Hi, Laura. Thank you so much for your talk. That was wonderful. I love hearing about modesty. It's definitely been a journey for me, as it is for many people.

The things that I thought were modest before weren't when I first became a Christian. And then as I keep going down my walk, I just keep making changes. And it's just so wonderful how gracious God is with us as well. He's not condemning of me at all. It's just little nudges here and there. And because I'm able to just be open and honest and make subtle changes, He just keeps nudging me along. And I love what you said about freeing as well.

I don't know how to explain it, but when I put a head covering on, I felt a sense of freedom. And it was something I really struggled with. I didn't really want to do, but then there was this freedom that came with it. And it was just so, so amazing. And I love what you said about how God has our best interests at heart and He loves us. And these things that He—you know, these—the things that He writes in the Bible that He, you know, commands us to do or suggests that we do is for our own good.

And I just love that you brought that up because it's true. Why would our Father, our loving, kind Father, ask us to do things that would just be so that we would be uncomfortable or don't have much freedom? It's just the complete opposite. So thank you so much for your talk today. There's also another comment in the chat box, and it says, "Thank you so much for sharing. I would love to hear practical pointers on how to teach your girls these things besides just living it.

What are some conversations you may have had with your young girls?" I'm thinking school-age girls. Yeah, I was just thinking about that. Honestly, Linda, when you said you weren't taught these things as a girl, I thought, "Oh, am I teaching this to my daughter? Not sure." So that's actually—I have one daughter who is 11 and another daughter who is 2. So I think it's something that I need to grow in is sharing how I think about these things.

We've started going on some walks together, which has been a really good way to talk. But I think one thing, as much as talking, is just even choices that we make. Like as we were recently getting ready for a wedding, our church is a little bit more casual maybe than some. We don't buy church shoes per se. We just wear our normal clothes to church, wear our normal shoes to church.

And so we were going to a wedding, and I noticed that a lot of the other girls had special shoes for the wedding, which I don't think is wrong. But it was kind of encouraging to me that my daughter was wearing her tennis shoes and she didn't really care.

And she didn't say, "Mom, why don't I have special shoes?" And so I think some of it is choices about not—some maybe not making choices that are not encouraging down those lines of, "You have to look this way for this." I mean, certainly I try to teach her to be neat and, you know, clean and all those things, but I think not encouraging her in the ways of, you know, adorning yourself or feeling like you need to do special things. Obviously, it's good to wear appropriate clothes for an occasion.

So that's just a random example. I don't think there's anything wrong with special shoes for a wedding. But yeah, I think that's the main thought I would have. I guess another one is just the environment and the things that you look at, the, you know, not seeing the—I think a lot of what I learned about the need to be beautiful was not anything that anyone ever told me. My mom did not encourage outward beauty. She didn't wear a lot of makeup. It wasn't something that my parents, I think, explicitly taught me.

It was just the environment I was in, the friend groups I was in, the public school where it's so obvious that—and also seeing the television and the ads and all of that, where it's so obvious that beauty is prized. And I think when we shield our children from some of that. And then I guess the last thing that comes to me is just what do we praise them for? I think it's very easy to praise a child for how they look, but it's really probably not that helpful because they can't help it.

You know, if your child happens to be pretty, they didn't do anything to be pretty. And if they happen to be not what the world considers pretty, that's not their choice either. And so obviously, it's fine to praise them for being neat or orderly or whatever. But one thing my husband and I have consciously tried to do is praise the children for things that they can choose to do for being kind or being generous, being helpful or caring, that those are the things we want to encourage.

But yeah, I'd love to hear from any older moms too. I know there are some here who have older daughters than I do, so I would love to hear if any of you have advice on the kinds of conversations you have to teach God's heart behind modesty. I'll share a question that came in the chat box as well. Just figure this out here. Without getting into semantics, I'm guessing that's how you say that. Or the letter of the law, are there any boundaries for head covering? Like, does all of the hair have to be covered?

Like, what a triangle over the head that kind of flops over the bun work? I think it's a good question. Trying to think about how we would—I think, again, like we talked about before, that the Bible gives principles and not always like just these very definite specifics on things like this. And so there is some freedom of conscience and personal choice. I think if you think about a table and, you know, does a tablecloth cover the table?

Like, if you have a tablecloth that covers the whole top of the table and most of the legs, you would say, "Oh, yeah, that's covered." If it covers the top of the table and some of the legs, you would probably say, "Yeah, that's still covered." If it covers just, you know, a square in the middle of the table, you might say, "Ah, it's not really covered." It's like there's something on top of it, but it's not really covered. So I don't know if that's a helpful analogy.

But I think, yeah, I think the biggest thing is just asking what does—I think covered, it's a, you know, it's a simple word. It's not a technical term. Just what does it mean to cover something? Obviously, you can tell from my head covering. I don't cover every hair on my head. I feel comfortable with that, that there's, you know, that there's a few hairs at the front, you know, a couple inches showing. I wouldn't be comfortable with, you know, way at the back, not being able to see it at all from the front.

And that's a personal choice. So I think it's something where just asking yourself and your heart and going to God in prayer and asking, you know, does He feel like this is an adequate covering? Yeah, I wouldn't want to make that a strong statement for somebody else. But yeah, I would just point you toward those principles, I think.

Another question that came in was, "When do you start having your daughters wear head coverings?" Yeah, there's a lot of different practices on this, even among sisters and brothers in our own church. Personally, I appreciate the—I heard someone explain it this way once—that if head covering is a principle of modesty and that's taught in the Bible, say, similar to honesty or to another part of modesty, you know, I teach my children to be honest from the beginning. I try to.

And I teach them to be modest from the beginning. I don't feel comfortable with men in shorts, so I don't dress little boys in shorts. And I, you know, teach my daughter to wear long dresses. At the same time, I think there is an element that the passage does say it's a woman. It doesn't say a child. You know, the Greek word is heinei, the woman. And that does mean like a woman. It can also mean a wife, but it's the general term for a woman.

So if they wanted to say child, there's a different word for that, just like in English. It doesn't say a girl, child. And so I'm not super—it's not like I'm, you know, running after my two-year-old, tying a head covering on her. But as our daughters' age, with our first one, she's—I've appreciated, and I think this is common in homes like ours, that girls want to be like their mom. And so they'll put on a head covering for fun when they're, you know, three or four or five.

And as our daughter has done that, our older daughter has done that. And as she's gotten older, she's worn it more and more of the time. I have a good friend who, I think when her children were about—when her daughters were maybe about 8 or 10, she began teaching them that the Bible says that when you pray, when a woman prays, she should wear a head covering. And so she started teaching them that when they would pray, that they should put on a head covering.

I think that's a helpful way to tie it to the teaching that's in the New Testament. So that's how we practice it. I think it's another one of these areas of freedom where there's not a—you know, there's not a strong teaching in the New Testament that makes it obvious one way or the other. But that's how I've thought about it.

And it's a question that the church has been thinking about for a long time because that book that I mentioned, Tertullian's The Veiling of the Virgins, is actually somewhat about that question. It's a little different. It's about whether unmarried young women in the church should be covered. And I think at this point, most of the church that practices head covering would believe that they certainly should. And that's what he argues. But it's a question that's been being asked for a long time. Hi, Laura. Hi.

My name's Dana. I'm enjoying listening in from California. I really appreciate how in this talk and in the YouTube video that you shared your journey throughout the years, I think a lot of people would meet maybe someone like you or I guess anyone probably in this chat, and they see, you know, a difference and a level of modesty. And I think there's a lot of assumptions that are made that, "Oh, you must have grown up in this," you know, or, you know, you're from a very sheltered background. I've noticed that.

And I grew up in a very, I don't know, secular American lifestyle. I totally went through that guest jeans phase that you mentioned and the brand names. I had red guest jeans too. I had multiple colors. And then kind of went through being very punk and, you know, lots of heavy makeup and hair dye and trashy clothes. And so it's been a long journey to being more modest and trying to line up with what the Bible teaches. So I just appreciate that you share that, the journey part of it.

And then I was just wondering if you have, aside from the story when you went to Israel, if you have any interesting or meaningful stories of what your modest appearance has, I don't know, made you encounter. I guess for me, sometimes I have had people who even they've talked with me multiple times, and I realized later they assumed I was Muslim. I was surprised by that.

And then also just people who come up to me and we start talking, I'll meet someone at the park, and one of their first questions is, "Oh, well, what religion are you? Where do you go to church?" Because obviously my appearance communicates that I'm religious in some way. And I found it's been very great because I love to talk about God with other people. So for you, I just wanted to ask if you've had any other interesting encounters because of your appearance. Right. Yeah, that's a good question.

And yeah, I appreciate what you said at the beginning. And I totally agree with you that when I first went, when I first visited a Mennonite church with my husband, I was so intimidated. I used to cry trying to get ready to get dressed because I didn't know what to wear. Like I knew that nothing I had was in any way suitable. And so it is strange to think that now people could look at me and think something similar, think that I've always been this way, because that's very much not the case.

Yeah, I totally agree with you that it does feel like dressing differently opens up doors. I think the first thing I noticed was that I've lived in Boston for a long time. And so I lived here before I was a Christian. And, you know, I was used to men like whistling or calling out things on the street sometimes. And I wasn't even, I mean, I wasn't dressed horribly. I was dressed like the rest of the people in the world, but that's what men do.

And once I started changing the way I dressed and dressing modestly, I found men were calling me ma'am and opening the door for me, even though I was, you know, still very young when I first started doing this. I think now in terms of meaningful encounters, yeah, similar to what you said that we've had, especially when I'm with our whole family with the children, we've had a lot of people just, you know, asking questions.

Sometimes I have people make assumptions, you know, and especially in Boston, there's not a lot of people who dress this way. There are more now than there used to be. But one time I got out of an elevator and I had a man stop and ask me, "Are you the Amish, like the embodiment of all Amish? Not an Amish person, but are you like the Amish?" Like, "Well, no, I got here in a car, so no, I'm not." But yeah, I think we've had more meaningful experiences where people are moved or, you know, ask about our faith.

And so it does, I think it does open up doors, especially when you're, you know, friendly and open to those kinds of conversations. I'm kind of shy, so that's not always easy for me. But yeah, I enjoy when people ask sincere questions. Laura, I wanted to thank you again so much for your talk and just very helpful to think and from so many different aspects. And covering the hair is a very new thing for me that I had not considered.

And also from my husband's book, thinking about wearing very vibrant colors and things were a good thing to think about. And what might I be trying to be gaining from how I'm dressing, even if I'm totally covered? But I wanted to ask too, also coming from a background where many of the women wear pants, how do you reason through and talk about some of those questions? Yeah. This is a topic I could say a lot about, so I'll try to be brief. Where to begin? I think for me, basically this starts with a principle.

And the principle is that God created male and female. And that was his choice. And it was a good choice. And he wanted male and female to be distinguished. And so they're distinguished by the curses that they're given in the garden and the things that they'll do on the earth. They're distinguished in Deuteronomy 15 when he says that it's an abomination for men to wear women's clothes and women to wear men's clothes.

And then again, 1 Corinthians 13 that we talked about, or sorry, 1 Corinthians 11 that we talked about differentiates men and women again with length of hair and with head covering. And then again in Titus 2, you see that differentiation with women's roles and men's roles. And so it's throughout the whole Bible that men and women are supposed to be different. They're supposed to look different. They're supposed to do different things with their lives and in the church.

And the push of our society is toward a gender, you know, gender bending. They're all the same. It doesn't matter, you know, a unisex kind of culture. And so for me, clothing is an opportunity to make a statement to the world that God created male and female and that that was a good choice.

And I think even with all the, we've had this conversation with a lot of people who have come to our church and said, "Oh, why do women not wear pants in your church?" And people say, "Oh, women have been wearing pants for so long." And it's an interesting history. And I think even if you ask someone who's saying that, you can say, "Okay, well, what's the symbol for a woman on a bathroom door? What's the symbol for a man?" It's always, at least mostly still, it's typically a skirt for a woman and pants for a man.

And likewise, when the world wants to dress up, women almost always wear a long dress or skirt. And when they don't, it's a feminist statement of some kind. Like, you know, Finnie was remarking recently on one of the royal weddings that was on the news a couple of years ago that like all these celebrities who wear pants 99 days out of the year, they're all wearing some beautiful, well, beautiful, you know, in the world's eyes, some ball gown. It's a long dress in order to go to a fancy event.

And so there's somewhere deep in people's hearts that they still know that dresses are feminine and that when they want to dress up and they want to be feminine, women put on a dress. So that's the basic answer I would give. In the modesty panel that we did that's on YouTube, I give a longer answer with some of the history of it.

And it's very interesting, the first women who wore pants, it was almost pretty much universally like lesbians, women who were trying to cross-dress in order to pretend to be men to do certain kinds of jobs. And so it's not a very, depending on your, you know, your point of view and your convictions, it's not a very beautiful history. And my husband has a book on the history of women wearing pants, and the title is something like "Rebels, Radicals," and something else.

And it's a secular book, but even they see it as that, that like, "Oh, these women who first did this were rebels and radicals." And so it doesn't exactly fit with, doesn't fit with the idea of following, I think, God's unchanging pattern for womanhood.

I don't think that that means that women can never wear something between their legs, like that, you know, leggings under your skirt are wrong to keep warm in the winter, or that, you know, I showed the picture of that salwar kameez, that Indian garment where they do have loose pants with a shorter dress over it. And in Northern Indian dress, that's a feminine dress. And I don't have a problem with that. I think that is female dress.

But I think the, you know, what you're talking about, like the Western kind of pants, I think it's really missing an opportunity to say, "I'm on God's side." And God created men and women to be different. And this is the way I express that in most cultures in the world, and certainly in Western American or European culture. So two more things here from the chat. One is just a comment. I really, really enjoyed your talk.

It's so freeing to know that God's commandments are given because he loves us and wants to bless us. And then a question is, "I'm on my journey to modesty and just last year started wearing only skirts and dresses. And just recently this year have started exploring head coverings as my heart longs to please the Lord in all things.

How do you handle situations where family or others who are close to you don't understand it or see it as modesty and give lots of opposition or ridicule about it?" And you might have touched on this a little bit on one of the other questions, but is there anything else that you wanted to add there? Yeah, I would just say, I think probably a lot of us on this call empathize with that situation. I can see several faces who I know have gone through that experience, including me.

When I first wore a head covering and my dad first saw me, he started crying. We, yeah, received a good bit of opposition from multiple angles. And it's very painful at the time. It's painful to feel strange and to feel like you're hurting family ties. You know, it's painful to be yelled at for the choices that you're making. A wise older friend, when I was in that stage, told me, "Wait five years." She said, "If you'll wait five years, the furor will calm down. Your family will probably calm down.

And they'll begin to recognize that in many ways you're the same person and personality that you were. And you'll have a chance to show through your testimony of your life that good things have changed in you." And I think that was the case with me, that it was very hard for my family to adjust to.

You know, it's not easy for someone to change their convictions so radically and suddenly say, "Oh, I don't, you know, for our family get-togethers, I don't want to go somewhere with a swimming pool or a beach because I don't want my little boys to see everybody in bikinis." You know, that's not easy to hear for everyone and not pleasant to have those kinds of changes. But I did find that to be the case that over time people have gotten used to it.

They have seen the fruit of the choices that we've made and have come to be, if not maybe excited about it, at least more accepting and the tension has gone down. And I think that's true with most of the friends that I have who have walked through this. Is there anyone else that has anything to share? So there's one other question here for you, Laura. Okay.

I also would like to hear Laura's thoughts on modesty with respect to standing out in public because our dress is too different from the rest of the world, not because the clothes that are modest versus immodest, but because the style or color is so foreign compared to how others are dressing. Is this also a kind of immodesty with modest being a kind of moderation? Sometimes I think it makes it hard for Christians new to this concept to imagine looking so odd. Or is it healthy to stand out?

I'm thinking obviously there's a balance about it, but how do you see it? Yeah, it's a good question. I do think that the Bible calls us to be pilgrims and strangers on this earth and that as the world goes from bad to worse, as Paul writes, that we're going to stand out more and more and we can't really help that in some ways. I think even like the number of children that we have, you know, we embrace children. My family has eight children. And even that is a major way of standing out.

And you know, people are silently counting the children in their heads as we walk by. And we're certainly not going to change that because we stand out, you know. So I think in some ways it's something that we can't help. On the other hand, personally, and this is a, you know, a difference I think with us from some people that I do feel like it's healthy for people to, when they see a head covering, to have it be something that they could imitate.

When I first started wearing a head covering, I was, well, actually, I was already wearing a head covering when I went to that church. But for a while, we visited a church where it was a very wonderful place and I appreciated the people very much. I learned so much. But the style of head covering they wore is something that you couldn't make yourself. It's, you know, it's, I couldn't make it. I have no idea how to make it. And something that I wouldn't even know where to buy.

And I think it's helpful when someone sees a woman who is dressed modestly to think like, "Okay, that's like a piece of cloth. I could go to Goodwill and buy a piece of cloth and tie it on my head and do something roughly like that." There's something called a plausibility structure where it's this idea that someone can see a way that they could fulfill that command also. And so the church can give a plausibility structure to people for following the commands of the New Testament in this world.

And so I think it's helpful to, and this is just my personal conviction. I know all churches don't follow this and I don't think that's wrong, but to have dress where it is something where it's not so different, like where there's not a requirement that it has to be homemade because I think there's a lot of people in this day and age who do not possess the ability or maybe the ability innately, but you know, just that sounds like a huge hurdle to overcome, like to buy a sewing machine and make a dress.

But if you say, "Hey, you can go to Goodwill and buy a long skirt and a loose shirt and a scarf and tie that on and you're modest," I think it's good when there is an option that's something accessible. I think when if modesty is something that's so rarefied, so different, just totally inaccessible, I think that can ultimately be a stumbling block and that that is something that our church has tried to do to make it be something that where we definitely want to be modest. We definitely want to be set apart.

We're not afraid of being different at all. But we also want it to be something where people say, "Oh yeah, I could do that." Like that's not, that's within my, that's within my grasp. I could, I could, not that it wouldn't be a sacrifice, not that it wouldn't make me look strange, but I know how I could put that into practice, I guess, if that makes sense. There's another question that came in. Is it modest to wear neon colors or prints of fabric with big patterns like flower things that attract attention?

I think that's an element that probably is somewhat cultural. I think, for example, our family has visited Uganda a good bit because we have a sister church there. And the colors there are just brighter than they are in the U.S. And the fabrics are just bolder. And that's just a traditional Ugandan, you know, that's just what their culture is. Similarly, India, my husband is Indian. And the main colors that are in people's houses are like mustard yellow and this like deep burgundy.

And a lot of the clothes are those colors too. So I think that, I think that is one that's slightly cultural. And I think, again, it's probably good to think about your culture, think about your situation, and think about your heart. And, you know, are you wearing a hot pink dress because you want people to look at you? Or, you know, are you wearing a skirt with big flowers because it's what you own?

And, you know, that it's, that it's, I can imagine a situation where someone could be wearing one of those things and it could be seeking attention. And in that way, I'm modest. And I can imagine a situation where it could be perfectly, you know, from the heart. And I think that's where we have to see each other and, yeah, look at people through as much as we can through God's perspective and remember, like, people are on a different journey and they're, they're learning.

I remember one time we had a sister here who was just starting to wear her head, wear a head covering. And she had a purple bandana, like a typical bandana with like the little white and black kind of, I don't know, that little pattern on it and purple. And I thought, I can imagine situations where she would be, you know, considered like, "Oh, that's not good. She's wearing a purple bandana as a head covering." But it was beautiful.

You know, it was what she had and it was her expression of first wearing a head covering. And even for me, I was looking at old pictures recently. And I found a picture of myself with my hair down and a head covering on. And I was wearing pants because that was my journey that I first figured out the head covering. Then I figured out I should wear a skirt. And I think God saw my heart in that and that I was learning things and it wasn't, you know, it wasn't intentional.

So I think, again, there's just that, yeah, question of perspective. Where is the person on their journey? And what is their heart in doing it? Thank you for that. And I know that there's a couple of you that tried to unmute yourselves and due to, I had forgot right at the end of her talk to hit the unmute button and then I tried and it didn't work. And so please do ask your questions. But in the meantime, there is a little testimony that came in here on the comments and I'll read that for you.

I am so grateful for this topic. I have been searching through the Bible, this exact topic and feel the Lord leading me to cover and to be more modest in every area of modesty Laura has touched on. I have learned so much. Thank you. Thank you. I have another question that came through the chat box as well. It said, "I found this talk very interesting. Thanks for sharing, Laura. I have quite a few sisters-in-law and sisters that quit wearing head covering and wear pants. I don't understand how they can do this.

I would appreciate your thoughts." Yeah, it's a hard question not knowing, you know, the situation or their choice in doing that. I think, yeah, I'm not really sure how to answer other than to maybe have conversations with them, try to understand where they're coming from. You know, on the one hand, I think, you know, the Bible does caution us that people will fall away and that's a very sad thing to watch.

And I think as Finnie and I have gotten older, that's something that we've seen happen is people changing their minds and turning the other way. We had an older couple that influenced us a lot when we were first starting this journey who have since gone back to wearing pants and the women wearing pants and not covering their heads. And it's very sad. It's very sad to watch. And Satan is, it says, a roaring lion who seeks to devour whom he will. So I think that will happen.

But I think probably the best thing to do is pray and seek to have conversations maybe just where you ask questions and try to understand where they're coming from. Thank you for sharing that. I like the one thing that you brought out. It was a point you made about complimenting or praising character over looks. I really like that. Just a practical pointer because I've kind of struggled with that in some ways in knowing, you know, having daughters.

You know, I've really wondered what the balance is with, I don't want them to think so much about their clothes yet. Also to care enough, you know, that we do want to be modest and quiet and clean and without putting too much emphasis on that. So I really appreciate that pointer. Yeah, so sorry, go ahead. Sorry, I was just going to say I think it's a really hard one. And I do think it is good for our daughters and sons to know that God made them in a good way.

And you know that they are, the way that they look is good because God made them. So I think there's that element that it's interesting. My husband and I have been reading through Sirach, which is a book from the Apocrypha. And there's actually a verse in there that says, "Do not praise anyone for how they look." And I found that fascinating that, I mean, obviously it's not, it's not scripture, but it's, you know, it's written by a Jewish author in between the Old Testament and New Testament.

But I just thought that that was a fascinating comment. So yeah, I do think it's a hard one. Well, that's amazing. That's actually really amazing. Yeah. But I also think that with all of parenting, I feel like it's, you know, there's not, there's not hard and fast rules and we just have to be kind of walking along and asking God to lead us and like, not just back this way when we go too far that way and not just back the other way when we're, you know, going too far the other direction.

And I think it's the same thing with how we interact with our children and teaching them, yeah, to value, to have dignity, to keep themselves clean and orderly, but not to fall into that trap of seeking to look a certain way to get people's recognition or approval. Yes, thank you, Laura. I'm so glad that you shared.

One thing that you shared that really, that I really appreciated is that we should continue to evaluate our situation as we change and as we grow older and in every situation that we don't just become complacent and continue to wear what we've been wearing, but that it's a topic that we visit often and that we change along with our bodies changing. Yeah, everything you said was very inspirational. Thank you so much for sharing. Thank you. Yeah, Laura, thank you too.

I kind of, yeah, your testimony really remembers my life and my journey starting with head covering, dressing modest. I am from Brazil and my culture, women's there, they really waste a lot of money with hair, dyeing hair or if you have curly hair, you straighten your hair. All these take a lot of money. And I was so much into that growing up. And so yeah, it was a very big thing when I started wearing head covering. And for my family, it was, oh, it was quite, yeah, it was so, so different for friends and family.

And going to Brazil, one of our trips, going to Brazil, we have a relative that whenever we, me and my family, my children, my husband, we would go visit that certain relative. She would comment a lot about my way of dress and my head covering. Highs would never come out of my head covering. It seems they would bother. And then I felt that. But yeah, finally one time, the last time we visited, yeah, she really was, she really was highs even with my head covering.

She was, she'd get up and said, "Why do you wear that? Why do you always wear the piece of cloth around you? Why are you doing that with your hair? Let me take you this." And she tried to yank the hair from my head covering from my head. And it was everything happening so fast. And I just put my hands on my head, trying to hold my head covering. And she wanted to take that. And she couldn't. And I hold on to it. But then after, just sit down and try to figure out what was happening.

And then we kept on the normal conversation, but she was really bothered with my head covering. And part of my relatives, I have a lot of relatives that are into voodoo and spiritism. And with that experience, it made me really think about the verse about when the Bible says about the angels because of authority and the angels. So it's a really, it is true for me that day was true that it was really the angels. I mean, the spirit force is really a lot behind it. And it really bothers.

So she, this relative is very much into voodooism. And the head covering really bothered her. And the dark spirit force behind it is really, it really was, yeah, it was really offending to her. And so I don't understand all like what you explained was very good for me today. But from that day on, I really, it was, it really gave me meaning more to keep on with my head covering, you know? And yeah, a lot of people, we have friends, some family, it really offended people. I don't know why, but it really does.

And it's, it's, and it is not really the people, it's what is behind it, you know? The devil and his angels, you know? So yeah, I just, when God asks us, it's more than what we see, you know, to we women, to cover our head. So I really, yeah, believe in that. It really honors not only my husband, but honors God. And there's a lot of pride in you wearing your hair, you having your hair uncovered. There's a lot of pride. There's a lot you can do. Like I remember when you mentioned about men's whistling, you know?

I remember in my young, in my teenage years, I remember when you know hearing, "Oh, look at her hair. Oh, this one has a nice hair. That one is, her hair is not as nice," you know? Depending on the type of your hair. It was so much, I heard so much of that, you know? And yeah, if you have your hair nice and long and showing up, it just, it calls attention and it really makes others to list. Yeah, thank you for that testimony.

Yeah, I think that's a great example of how it really does, the head covering really does have a spiritual power that, yeah, we choose to put on. I have a little testimony to that, to what Sister Bruna had said. I had a Mennonite lady who actually told me that there was a family that had, there was a family that had adopted a demon-possessed boy. And he wanted to do evil to the parents. And he had confessed himself that every time I want to do something, I can't do something because of that thing on your head.

So I thought I would share that. Yeah, thank you. I think we're winding down here, but is there anyone else yet? Yeah, there's another one here in the chat box. It says, "This may be a silly question. I don't think it's a silly question. But what does a modest or gentle and quiet spirit look like day to day?" That's a great question. Yeah, I don't think it's a silly question. I think, yeah, you know, submission to your husband and an atmosphere of peace and, you know, not fighting.

I've certainly been in homes, not Christian, I don't mean a Christian home, but I've been in situations and homes where the husband is constantly like bitten at by the wife. Like everything she says is like, "Why did you do that? Why are you so dumb? Why did you think you would do that?" And it's, if you haven't been in that kind of situation, it's incredibly unpleasant. It puts everybody on edge. So I think, yeah, an atmosphere of submission, getting along, yeah, just being in communication with God at peace.

I think those are some of the qualities of a meek and quiet spirit. There's actually a very good book by a woman named Terry Maxwell called Homeschooling with a Meek and Quiet Spirit, which I think is something I read in the past and found helpful, particularly just in the context of, yeah, how do we express, what does a meek and quiet spirit look like in a long day with homeschooling, lots of children? There's another question that came in.

It says, "Talking about hair, my daughters have lots of beautiful hair and often get comments on it. How do I teach them to respond? Thanks a lot, Laura." Yeah, I actually had a good friend whose daughter had long, kind of very wavy blonde hair. It was beautiful. And even when she wore it in a braid, it was just, it was like a rope. It was thick. And even when she was little, like seven or eight, people would comment on it.

And with her, that was actually, her mom decided that that was a good reason for her to wear a head covering was just so that she would get less attention for it because it felt kind of distracting in, you know, in the walking around town and so many people making comments about her hair that it was, you know, time to cover it just to take away that distraction. I think also just teaching them, you know, this is, your hair is beautiful.

The Bible says that, you know, God made the hair as the woman's glory and teaching her what the Bible says, you know, to do with that as she grows older that we're to, you know, to cover it and to hide our glory. I think that would be one thing to do. This is a little different, but for a long time, we had many sons and one daughter. And so many people in, when we would go to a restaurant or a store or walking down the street, would say, "Oh, she must be the princess.

She must be spoiled," and would make all these comments about our daughter. And it was kind of a similar situation where I felt like we needed to like talk about it at home. Like, why do they say that? And, you know, what's the reason that the world talks about girls as princesses? And, you know, how is that not true? And just kind of talking through it and addressing it, I think, is helpful.

But it, yeah, it's a great example of how the hair is a glorious thing that God made and that that's part of the reason that we cover it to hide that or to not, you know, to not bring the glory to ourselves, but to deflect it to God. Thank you for that. And I would have somewhat of the same testimony with our daughter. We started, we chose to start veiling around the time that they went to school. And before that, she would get comments about how her hair looked and things like that.

And after we started veiling, that went away. And I think that what you talked about, about the head covering being about modesty, that to us is why we veil our daughters is for the modesty's sake. And I think that that's one area that it shows up in. There's another comment that came in that says, "My journey to head covering has stemmed from studying 1 Corinthians 11 with the understanding that it is commanded for times when speaking to God or hearing from God. Thank you for highlighting the Isaiah passage.

I will further look into whether the scriptural view of modesty is to be covered at all times in public." I've always seen the Corinthians passage, plus the one about not plating the hair, indicating that we have freedom in the area outside of those two areas, the prophesying and praying. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, when I, I guess my personal experience was that I, like my husband is Indian.

And so one of the Indian practices is that like your clothing includes a scarf and that a lot of Indian women will like pull, Indian Christians will pull up the scarf over their head when they want to pray and take it down when they don't. And so I tried that for a little while. And I have to say, I think partly my heart was like not totally right because I partly wanted to not wear it all the time and not look so weird because that was hard.

I was the only person that I knew in the entire city of Boston who covered my head. And it felt really hard to do it. And so I think some of my heart motivation in trying that was not right. But at the same time, I had a one-year-old baby at the time or maybe six months, and it just felt completely impractical because every time I wanted to pray, I would be doing something with my hands, like nursing or, you know, taking care of the baby somehow. And I could never like get the scarf pulled up when I wanted to pray.

I think I only tried it for a few days. And I finally decided this just doesn't really work for me. And if I want prayer to be a continual conversation with God, which is my ideal, then I like to wear a head covering. I think it works for me to wear a head covering all the time because that way I'm always, not all the time, like not when I sleep, but, you know, during waking hours so that I'm able to go to God in prayer at any time and there's not some extra step I have to take before I pray.

So that was how I reasoned it out when I first started wearing a head covering. And I think I didn't understand the modesty principle of it until further on in my journey. So that was why I first started wearing a head covering for, you know, basically most or all of my waking hours. And then, but now I think with the modesty element, I have that as well. So I, you know, I wouldn't go out in public even if I weren't going to pray without it.

But I do think that idea of continually praying is a good one in favor of at least wearing it, you know, more often than not. Thank you for that, Laura. I think that's all the questions. There's no one else that we have for now. My heart is full and excited about this, all this conversation. Thank you, everyone who shared. Such a blessing. So before we part today, we're going to ask Laura to lead us in prayer. Okay. Thank you all so much for listening and spending your Saturday afternoon here. I'll pray.

Dear God, we thank you for your word. We thank you for your fatherly heart for us and that you call us your Father. You call us, you call yourself our Father and that you have chosen to love us and make us your children. God, we're so thankful for these things. I thank you for each of the women here. And God, I pray that you will speak to us and work your truth into our hearts, teach us in the way that we should go, God, when we are walking off the path in one direction or another. Please convict us by your Spirit.

And God, I pray that you would, anything I've said that's not true, that you would allow that to fall to the ground, but you would preserve the things that are true and from your word. God, I pray that you would bless all these women in their day as they go on from here. And please, please equip and enable and help us to be faithful to you. Pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. God bless you, Laura, for sharing here. And God be with you all as you go your separate ways today. Thank you. All right.

You all have a good day. See you. Bye. Thank you. Walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing him, being fruitful in every good work.