“Honor God with your body”

I have been there. Oh, how I have been there. You?

This place I’m talking about is that locked, secret place between our heads and our hearts where we run into the first vestiges of a desire, a perceived lack, an alluring thought. It’s the space where we ask ourselves the questions we don’t ask aloud to another human and we begin to ponder and wonder and think, “what if?”

Like I said, I’m pretty familiar with this place. Most of us are, whether we’ve named this place or not. It was in this place where I first ran into something I lacked. In my childhood years, I ran into the thing that whispered, “You are not enough”. That whisper got a little louder with each passing year, and by high school it said, “You will never be enough”. In college, the thing got more specific. It started to scream, “You are not thin enough, you are not pretty enough, you are not smart enough, you are not kind enough…”

And here is the thing: this thing and this space is within us. We cannot outrun it, we cannot hide from it, we cannot ignore it. This leads most of us to try to control it. We try so hard to control the world in response to the things that get brought up in this space. For me, this looked like an eating disorder with a side of high-functioning anxiety. For you it might look like those things, it might look like over-functioning, under-functioning, hypersensitivity, a hyperfocus on getting tasks and people “completed correctly,” a lack of desire to do anything to avoid, pleasure-seeking, and so much more. No matter what shape it takes, so often we forget that our bodies and every part of them, including our tender hearts and our secret places, are deeply known and immeasurably loved by God. Even more than that, they are known and loved just the way they are.

That locked, secret place? God is right in there with you. He hears the whispers you hear, feels the temptations you feel, is ready to gently respond to that desire for control. He hears our doubts, He hears our rationalizations, He hears our questions and our fears. So, what if, rather than using all of our strength to bend the world and everyone in it and ourselves into the shapes we think they ought to be, we used all that we are and all that God created us to be to honor Him? To simply put a hand up to the thing in the secret place and say back, “I hear this and I see this. Is it true? Is it helpful? Is it kind? Is this belief/thought/desire aligned with what God wants for me and will it reflect His image?”

I’m proud of you for doing the hard work of living faithfully in a really loud world (and maybe also in your own really loud head). He is with us here, and within us here. Let us walk together in that beautiful, wondrous truth that sets us free.