Hello, my dear friend. This one is going to be a brave one. Most of my blogs and my plans for my blog have been based around areas that are a bit more on the “safe” side. I’m known to be well-composed and able to skirt around difficult subjects by making everything sound really poetic and nice so that it doesn’t REALLY blatantly state some of the deeper things going on. I enjoy pointing out meaningful things and talking about them in ways that are inspiring. Well, I’ve come to a point where the most meaningful and deep thing going on is me reconciling with my own body. As of recent, I have discovered that I carry a detrimental amount of body shame.
Why am I talking about this? Well, I’m on a determined mission to allow the Spirit of God to bring to my attention areas inside of me that really need healing. It’s amazing how comfortable I can get with my normalcies and not realize they are really really harming me and my pursuit of living a healthy life. I refuse to settle for a life of “survival” as a believer in Jesus. I want health and I want freedom. I’ve been doing an in-depth study on Galatians which is a fantastic letter from Paul to the Galatian church, which he started. They had gone from living a life vibrant in the Spirit of God to living enslaved by a teaching that came into the church telling them they had to “add” to their redemption by doing something. In reality, living for Jesus is blatantly allowing the truth to settle that we can’t earn God’s love or salvation. We can only accept that we can’t do anything to add or subtract and embrace that Jesus stands before God for our sake and calls us His own because He earned God’s love and salvation for us. Jesus is also insanely proud of the fact that He got to do that for us. He looks at us and He sees beauty and charm. He sees wonder and intricate art. He sees a song and a poem interwoven together to make beautiful humanity. He doesn’t see me and say, “Well, that’s a broken piece of crap! I’ll just leave that one alone.” He DOES see the brokenness and He desires to heal it. But for that to happen, we have to see it too and we have to accept His way of healing it, not our own. I’ve lived a long time believing that I was a failure and that I had to prove I was “worth” dying for. Little did I know that I AM worth it without doing a thing. Literally the best moment of my life was realizing that. It’s absolutely incredible. Why would I ever go back?
For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
Galatians 5:1
Since realizing I can’t save myself and I can’t earn love, I’ve started to approach my relationships differently and my own relationship with God as a place of healing instead of proving/earning. So, how does this relate with body shame? Well, I’ve been able to put a lot about my life under this new light of love and acceptance. I’ve been able to start the process of dealing with my own issues in my relationships with others and in my relationship with myself. Now, I’m dealing with it in my relationship to my body which I’m discovering is seriously important in my life. I can’t be separating out my body from the rest of my life because thats the main issue in our culture today anyways. I’ll get more into that later in a future post.
Why I’m doing this particular entry is because I’m really aware how much shame has control over me by keeping me silent. The first step towards freedom from something is being able to talk about it because shame controls by keeping it hidden. I think shame, in essence, is silence about something we are afraid of being judged guilty of. I can begin to control shame by speaking up. I am only able to speak because I know that I am not guilty in the eyes of the one Judge who could hold it against me. I am free before God, therefore I am not afraid to bring this into His courtroom. His courtroom is for my freedom not for my enslavement. So, here I am telling you that I struggle with feeling ashamed of my body and I feel even more ashamed of the fact that I am ashamed of my body. There’s SO much in that and I’ll deal with it over time. I’m going to continue to bring this up and process my journey in this area through multiple posts. I invite you to join me in this and follow along as I confront shame and walk out healing in my day-to-day living. I can’t wait to experience freedom in this area of my life because I know it’ll change the trajectory of my whole health as a woman of God. SO PUMPED.
I love you and I’m grateful for your attention. Let’s go after it.
Check out the main resource I’ll be using throughout my pursuit of body health:
In Response: 