When I was a kid, I felt sorry for Peter Rabbit and thought Mr. McGregor a grump and a meanie.
I've become Mr. McGregor!
So, we put up a snow fence around our garden and every few days I'll spray coyote urine around the bottom (yes, you can buy coyote urine...I wonder how they collect it).
Today has a been a hot day. Hot and blowy. And I couldn't take a walk because every muscle felt so heavy. And a haze of uncertainty hung in the air. And my body keeps changing shape -- growing in places I really would rather it didn't, but it is life for me right now. It is a struggle I'm dealing with -- accepting my changing and aging body for the beautiful creation it is. God wants us all to do this.
In a book entitled An Altar in the World: a geography of faith by Barbara Brown Taylor, Taylor has a chapter called "The Practice of wearing skin."
It is such a great chapter. I want to share a few quotes from it:
"Yet, here we sit, with our souls tucked away in this marvelous luggage, mostly insensible to the ways in which every spiritual practice begins with the body.
"We would rather lock up our bodies than listen to what they have to say. Where Christians are concerned, this leaves us in the peculiar position of being followers of the Word Made Flesh who neglect our own flesh or -- worse -- who treat our bodies with shame and scorn.
"our bodies remain God's best way of getting to us.
"The daily practice of incarnation -- of being in he body with full confidence that God speaks the language of flesh -- is to discover a pedagogy that is as old as the gospels. Why else did Jesus spend his last night on earth teaching his disciples to wash feet and share supper? With all the conceptual truths in the universe at his disposal, he did not give them something to think about together when he was gone. Instead, he gave them concrete things to do -- specific ways of being together in their bodies -- that would go on teaching them what they needed to know when he was no longer around to teach them himself."
This is good stuff!
I don't agree with everything Barbara Brown Taylor writes in this book, but I sure identify with this need to see the body I have been given as sacred. It is a gift from God to me. Without it I couldn't love others. Without it I couldn't experience life. Without it I couldn't serve Jesus and love him and show others him.
It is anti-god and anti-biblical to compare our bodies to other people's bodies. For always one will fall up short. We are all different. We are meant to be different.
I took clothes and stuff to a thrift store today -- clothes I no longer can fit into. And if someone else told me this about themselves I would tell them to embrace their bodies exactly as they are. I'd say read those beautiful verses from Psalm 139:13-14:
"For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.[a]
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well."
I remember one time I was at a volleyball game watching the girls play. The girls were all different sizes and shapes. And all of them were beautiful. Every single one. Each one of us are too. I believe this -- I do. I honestly do. But every single cell in my body has to catch up to this truth. I'm working on it. God is working on it with me.
So, we're working on this next phase together.
We serve a loving and patient God. He wants only the best for us. The very best.