Her Body Bears the Word

The question I bring with me to this work is: what kind of shape must my body be in for it to be usable for the work of God? It is at once an extremely personal question and a universal question. It is personal in that it is all about my body and what I need to do to get my body into God-shape. It is universal because we all have these bodies into which we were born. We all wrestle with these bodies. We all have things that we love about these bodies and things we despise about them. And, as a Christian woman, I believe that each of our bodies were uniquely formed and created by God to serve God and the world. As a Christian woman, I also believe that the sentence I just wrote is a complex statement because no two bodies are the same.

Some Christian writers have argued that God wants all of us to have the lowest Body Mass Index possible, thus effectively shaming rounder bodies. Others have argued, in the words of the prophet Samuel that people look at the outer appearance but God looks at the heart, thus effectively training Christians to neglect physical health (because it is only appearances, after all) in favor of developing a heart for God. I disagree with both of those stances. God is not in heaven judging our body mass indexes. God also would not have given us these physical bodies if they were about mere appearance. We are called to use these bodies to be good stewards of all of God’s creation.

The time is now for us to release the body-obsession that so many of us have, and to focus instead on love. Our outlooks change when we center our minds on love for God, love for self, and love for neighbors. I mean that deep theological, earth-shattering, agape love that drives out fear. When we have that kind of love for our bodies, we don’t fear weight gain, weight loss, roundness, flatness, thinness, flabbiness, or anything in between. Consider the adoption of a body love theology.