A Little TLC

Meet my plant. This green beauty with white treasures has taught me a valuable lesson: everything responds to being taken care of. I bought it last year for my office and wasn’t paying it much attention. I’d forget to water it and prolonged transplanting it to a bigger pot. I recently bought her home and transplanted her, and I’ve kept her in my room instead so I’d water her more regularly. And as you can see, she is flourishing. All she needed was a little TLC.

This is not only true about possessions like plants, but it’s also applicable to relationships, whether with others or self. I’ve seen it with my relationship with self. A few months ago my doctor suggested I start exercising (dancing to the Fitness Marshall videos didn’t count in his books). I was a bit taken back. Here was a rather chronic condition and the man was suggesting I jump rope to help ease it. I was sceptical but I was also desperate, so I joined the group class at my local gym.  Guess what? I saw improvement in just a month! I felt so dumb to have endured so much pain when there was such an easy remedy available. I now enjoy and even look forward to group class (shout out to Magda and the Mfitness girls).

All this reminded me about teachings Joyce Meyer has been adamant about over the years about taking care of our bodies. And it’s not just something she preaches, but something she lives, hence why she does not look like the average seventy four year old. She likes saying God will not do what is ours to do. It is ours to take care of our bodies and feed them correctly, it is God’s to do what we can’t do. We cannot be praying for healing yet living a lifestyle that works against those prayers. I’m not about to side with my Dogmatics lecturer who believed eating junk was a sin, but all I’m saying is that it matters what we do (or don’t do) with our bodies.

In fact, Paul draws a connection between loving our bodies and taking care of them in Ephesians 5:29. How you feel about yourself is a determining factor in how you’ll treat yourself. Some, out of hatred for their bodies, torture their bodies and fall prey to eating disorders. This is sometimes rooted in the incorrect understanding that taking care of your body is about body size. God has made each of us unique, and his wonder and beauty is seen in our uniqueness, hence the psalmist celebrates in Psalm 139. The goal of taking care of yourself is being a healthier version of you, not looking like someone else.

Others do little to nothing for their bodies because they don’t really think it matters. I won’t lie, while growing up in my faith, the only time I heard anything said in Church about our bodies was when being warned against sexual immorality, and it was only in that sense that we were to understand our bodies as God’s temples. We have put more emphasis on our spiritual health and emotional or mental health but dismiss the importance of our physical health, which actually impacts the other two. My spirit lives in this body, and every “spiritual” act I do, I do in this body, whether I’m praying, reading my Bible or worshiping through song and dance. Again, Paul makes this connection wonderfully in Romans 12:2.

I  came across this quote by Elisabeth Elliot:

“We cannot give our hearts to God and keep our bodies for ourselves”

It’s actually taken from a paragraph about Christian self-disciple, but I especially loved the last sentence. It drills in well what God said in Deuteronomy 6:5, that we don’t just love God with our hearts, but also with all our soul’s thoughts and decisions, and with all the strength of our bodies.

I’m not there yet with the eating right part, but I’m working on it. More so with the sugar since I’ve spent thousands of rands and endured many painful sleepless nights because of my teeth. I’m getting in enough sleep by making it a point to sleep before midnight and I’m drinking more water since I started drinking purified water since I hated the taste of tap water.

It’s a lot, yes, but it’s doable, with Christ you can do all things, right? So I challenge you to make more effort in taking better care of yourself, I guarantee you that if you do, you too will bloom!