Made in the Image of God

Before having a baby, I didn't think that much about my body. I wasn't particularly bothered by any aspect of it but I didn't really love it either... I just kind of used it and tried to keep it healthy and otherwise ignored it. After having a baby, my body jumped up on center stage and started screaming for my attention in a way it never had before, even during the tumultuous changes of adolescence. Suddenly my belly looked different, my breasts were bigger, I was producing milk, another human being (albeit a tiny one) was visibly and tangibly depending on my body for his very life, I hurt in unexpected places, and a line across my abdomen was raised and numb. Every time I changed, or took a shower, or went to the bathroom, or nursed my baby (so essentially all the time), the changes in my body stood out to me, and I didn't like them.

At first it was really hard. I wanted my old body back, and I wanted to have it to myself again. No more stretch marks, loose muscles, or scars; no more semi-continuous physical touch; no more worrying about "overdoing it" in the simple everyday activities of life; no more struggling to balance my baby's and my husband's needs for physical closeness. I would try on my old pre-pregnancy jeans and get depressed, or catch a glimpse of myself wandering the house in pajamas and feel ugly and inadequate.

But as time went by, something surprising began to happen. The negative feelings were born of the difficulty of the transition from a pre-pregnant body, through pregnancy, to a post-pregnant body, and they were natural. Change can be hard, and it takes time to adjust. And because those feelings were simply a product of the transition, they didn't stick around forever.

One day I looked at the dark web of lines on my abdomen and thought, I am a life-giver.

I looked at my lopsided, leaking breasts and thought, I am a life-sustainer.

I looked at my weary arms after rocking my baby to sleep and thought, I am a comforter.

I looked at the curves of my body curled around my baby as he nursed away his tears and thought, I am a safe haven and a place of rest.

In the blurred-together days and endless nights of those first few weeks, my body had somehow, in all its raw and rough reality, began to take on the image of God as it never had before, and in so doing, reminded me how God is all those things to me: the giver and sustainer of my life, my comforter when I am sorrowful or discouraged, my refuge from the fears and toils of life. How can I look at my body and think it is ugly, when it is a witness to me of the goodness and faithfulness of God? It is beautiful, when it shows me His image, because He is beautiful. We read in Genesis that we are made in the image of God, but I think we forget that this includes our physical bodies just as much as our spiritual, emotional and rational capacities. I know I had never thought of it that way before, anyway. God has left testimonies of Himself in the smallest, most physical and material details of our lives, so that we don't need to be deep and profound thinkers to see His presence and be reminded of His character, and if we open our eyes to those glimpses of Him, I think, our lives will be more beautiful. The things we take for granted, the things we hardly think about, even the things that we dislike - they are worth looking at a second time, with new eyes, to see if we can find a picture of God within them.

How to care about things (without being overwhelmed)

In one of the many film retellings of the classic story of Cinderella, Ever After, the formerly apathetic, self-centered, and purposeless prince says, "I used to think, if I cared about anything, I'd have to care about everything, and I'd go stark raving mad!" So he chose instead, for years, to care about nothing.

I wonder if that's how most Americans are today. We are constantly presented with so many causes and needs - with starving refugees in Africa, sex slavery in Southeast Asia, human rights abuses in China, environmentally destructive practices in the US, and countless natural disasters like the earthquake in Haiti or Hurricane Sandy in New York, not to mention the myriad of social and political issues on both sides of the worldview split. The sheer quantity and magnitude of the problems overwhelms us, and so we bury our heads in the sand and seek our own personal happiness while closing our eyes and ears to the needs all around us. Now, it makes sense that we feel overwhelmed. There really are more problems (and problems of larger scope) than we could ever hope to fully address with our limited time, skills, and resources - and how could we ever hope even to figure out which problem most deserves the time and resources we could give it? If we help to rehabilitate former prisoners in our local communities, do we need to feel guilty that we are not also helping to train and restore former sex slaves in Thailand? If we donate to food programs in refugee camps around the world, do we need to feel guilty that we are not donating to our local food banks? It's not difficult to picture ourselves suddenly snapping from the weight of it all and, in the words of the aforementioned prince, going "stark raving mad!"

But this madness is not by any means a necessary or unavoidable consequence of beginning to care about one problem or another. We just need to give ourselves the permission to accept our limitations and the command to work within them to best of our abilities. Acknowledging that we are fallible and limited simply by nature of being human allows us to truly care about one specific problem - and devote ourselves to its correction - without feeling guilty about all the other problems we don't have the time or skills to adequately handle. And once we truly care about something, it will be a joy, a source of meaning and purpose, to throw ourselves towards its resolution. I think all the half-hearted efforts we make in life stem from the absence of this genuine concern about the problem and the concomitant desire to see it resolved; that they are, in essence, the output of a guilty conscience prodding an apathetic will into temporary action. But if we let ourselves deeply and genuinely care about one or two problems (that we are capable of acting upon in tangible, relevant ways), and allow ourselves to dispense with guilt about all the other hundreds of problems in the world, we can start to act with our whole hearts, with a motivated will, and with real purpose.

And I have a suspicion that we just might find our capacity for caring and acting increased as we go about the process of living with purpose instead of apathy, until we have touched more lives and brought about more good than we ever imagined possible.

The Seat of the Scornful

In Psalm 1, the blessed man is described as one who does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly, stand in the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of the scornful; that last phrase is one that has often confused me and given me cause to think and ponder. What I'm coming to think is that the scornful, or the mockers, are those who practice the soul-destroying art of flippancy in the Screwtapian sense. They are those who look upon good, noble, and virtuous things with a cynical and contemptuous gaze, or with open disregard for what they would call the foolishness and futility of those things. And to sit in their seat is to look at life from their vantage point and through their eyes. In some way I feel that this attitude of scorn toward life is one of the most dangerous and destructive things in the world, both for the individual who holds it and for the society around that individual, but it is incredibly difficult for me to express this importance with words of enough meaning and strength.

There are things in this world that are of primary and utmost importance, things that characterize our humanity and serve as the rich soil for our roots or the sky which healthy growth strives to reach. Some of these things are the innocent and fundamental aspects of physical and temporal life in the midst of all God's creation - things like hard work, marriage, babies, beauty in a flower or a mountain or the face of a woman, strength in the arms of a man, and the fellowship of believers worshiping God together. Others are the good and glorious principles and virtues that stretch through eternity and underlie all that is worthwhile in temporality - things like the love and grace of God, justice, righteousness, honesty, compassion, holiness, and judgment; the high praises of God in the mouths of His saints as they wield the two-edged sword of His word; all that is lovely, pure, noble, praiseworthy, and of good report.

But the destroyers of civilization - no, let us call them the destroyers of humanity - attempt to cut away at the reverence and value we ascribe to these things, and they do so with mockery, scorn, contempt, and the overriding derision of elite and enlightened opinion, first, and then of public opinion more broadly. If we cast away those things, however - if we trade in laziness and entitlement for diligence and hard work, for instance, or falsehoods and manipulation for honesty and faithfulness - what will we have left? There will be nothing left worth living for; there will be nothing left that is characteristically human in the majestic and beautiful sense of humanity for which we were all created, which we may one day hope to see, and which we as of yet can still see occasional glimpses here and now. By making those good and virtuous things objects of mocker and scorn, we lose both the rich soil of a godly and honorable temporal life and the high and glorious heavens that soar in the eternal visions and aspirations of one who seeks to know and follow God. Stunted and weakened, we wither inwards in petty sins and quiet despair, having barred the door of our hearts to both life and joy.