Be Good to Your BodyNäide

AND IT WAS GOOD

I was eleven years old when a neighbor girl told me I had thunder thighs. And I believed her. When I look back at photos of my eleven-year-old self, the last thing I see is thunder thighs. Yet her words cut deep, and I believed them for most of my adolescent and young adult life.

I’ve come a long way since then, but even in my thirties, I sometimes find myself overthinking how my legs (and other parts of my body!) appear. It’s wild how difficult it can be to shake the lies spoken over us early in life.

Genesis 1:31 says, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” If all that God created is called good by the Creator Himself, then being good to our bodies, even when we don’t like a feature or we try to heal something that seems to be malfunctioning, requires that we consistently revisit truth.

Ask yourself: Do I take God at His word? Do I believe that all that He created, including my body, is good?

If I agree with the creator of all things that my body is part of His good creation, that means it is worthy of being given the good things He created for its thriving. I can give the good body God gave me the good things He made for it. Not because I did anything to deserve those things, but because He did everything to freely give them and because He has called me worthy.

So the second question to ask ourselves when it comes to how we view our bodies and the steps we take to support their wellbeing is, Am I doing this [diet, fitness plan, protocol] to glorify my body for the sake of what it can do for me or to glorify the God who gave me this body for the sake of fulfilling His calling for me?

Being good to our bodies means agreeing with our creator that all He created is good, including our bodies. And then it’s not being preoccupied by them—caring for them, yes, but not beating them into submission or obsessing over every imperfection. The less we fixate on our bodies—whether on the things we love or the things we dislike—the more capacity we have to keep our eyes on Jesus as we live in the body He gave us to fulfill His call on our lives well.

God, thank You for creating my body with care and calling it good. Help me to see my body through Your eyes, not through the lies I’ve believed. Amen.