Feeling At Home
“Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord.”
A question to start the new year: Do you feel at home in your body?
I know it may seem like a silly question, because who would even want to feel at home in a illness-stricken, pain and imperfection-laden body? But it’s honest, and I really encourage you to think about your answer and why. I started thinking about that question on my second round of reading the book The Wounded Healer by Henri J.M. Nouwen. In the book, Nouwen writes “But human withdrawal is a very painful and lonely process, because it forces us to directly face our own condition in all its misery as well as all its beauty. But when we are not afraid to journey into our own center, and to concentrate on the stirrings of our own souls, we come to know that being alive means being loved.”
And so, I ask the question again: Do you feel at home in your body? In other words, have you taken the time to look inwardly and face what you’re feeling? Have you thought about those feelings and how they are affecting you personally and others around you? How do you process our pain and roller coaster rides of our illnesses? Or do you process it at all? These questions are important for a couple of reasons. First, they allow us to identify and fight the emotions that tend to isolate and pull us down. Second, they can often reveal the areas where we have not allowed God to permeate - where His love hasn’t transformed and renewed us.
Being at home in our bodies doesn’t mean that we lie down and stop fighting, nor does it mean we give up hope of healing. What it means, at least to me, is that with every “stirring” that happens through symptoms or the like, the peace and comfort of God are still present enough to overcome it. It means feeling terrible physically, but still being able to feel the embrace of our Heavenly Father who cares for us. It means that our illnesses aren’t able to throw us off of having Christ-like character, because we can identify the cause-and-effect relationship between our feelings and actions. Being at home isn’t the absence of pain or emotion, but it’s the space in which we have the ability to reconcile those things with what God says to and about us.
If we look at this from a Biblical perspective, we only have to search a few verses in 2 Corinthians 5. Paul writes, “We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So we make it our goal to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.” (vs 8-10) We are well aware of the limitations of our “jars of clay,” but we can’t just sit around and wait to be with the Lord.
When we understand our bodies as our temporary but essential dwelling, we can begin to grasp the importance of being at home in them. What we do with our bodies during our lives determines where our souls will rest for eternity. We - our thoughts and actions - are not given leniency because of our illnesses. There’s work to be done. There’s revelation to be had. There are people to be loved and discipled. Some days, honestly, we hate our bodies, yet they are still dwelling places for the Holy Spirit and the work of God that needs to be done on Earth. This is why Paul writes “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.” (2 Corinthians 4:16)
I pray that you see this post not as a reflection of where I once was and no longer am. I’m somewhere along the process, and I know it’s not easy and it doesn’t feel great. Introspection is work, but I fear I may miss the mark, or the purpose, in so many areas if I don’t strive to feel at home in my body. God loved me enough to put me in this home until I can rest with Him. And, at the very least, I owe it to Him to fulfill my duty of getting everything out of this home while I have it.