Recovering Life #3- MY BODY- Clay not Machine

 

In more normal times your cough, sneeze or runny nose would accompany you out the door and on with your day.  Life goes on after all. Different story in a time of Covid.  To break the transmission of the virus we’ve been asked to be more conscious of our health than many of us are used to.  Heaven forbid the dreaded cough which grounds the whole house as tests are awaited! 

As we’ve made our way through life with Covid we’ve had to teach our bodies new tricks.  Catching coughs and sneezes.  Washing or sanitising hands more often.  Guiding our feet around one way systems in shops.  Our elbows have come into the limelight as our handshakes and hi-fives have taken a back seat.  Finding our happy place as someone has inserted a swab far enough up your nose to touch the back of your head (so it feels, anyway!)

When our bodies are healthy and well we don’t tend to think of them very often.  Maybe it’s just then they decide they deserve a little bit of attention and choose to say hello.  

Following three months of lockdown and all the adjustments to my life with pharmacy, church and at home we had gone on holidays looking forward to getting away and lightening the load.  One week in with coffee and book in hand I felt a strange headache.  I stood up to get some medicine, thinking it might be a migraine, and nearly fell over as my arms and legs were wildly uncoordinated.  I had some slurring of speech and dizziness.  A short time later, following an ambulance to hospital and CT scan, I was informed I had a bleed on my brain around my cerebellum.  

Over the coming weeks, as I recovered strength, my mind revisited the time before for any warning signs I may have missed.  Despite no elevated high blood pressure nor significant feelings of anxiety or stress I could recall moments where I felt I was pulling from a deep place within me.  
Despite learning to go slower and deeper and having intentional rhythms in place to rest and recharge I had been putting off the need to take an extended holiday or sabbatical.  

It just wasn’t the right time for it.  I concluded I had been on the road too long and asking too much of myself.  

In describing our bodies like the soil I really resonate with what Jefferson Bethke says,
“Both the soil and our bodies get exhausted- literally, we deplete the life from them.” He insists that we then have to find artificial ways of providing life- fertiliser for the soil and caffeine or sugar hits for our bodies.  Both the comfort of sweet treats and an increased amount of caffeine had become trends in my coping with lockdown demands.  

This connection between soil and our bodies in the biblical story comes from being made of the same stuff.  

Genesis 2.7 

Then the Lord God formed a man 

from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils 

the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

We are made of matter- the very dust of the ground and by the breath of God are given the kiss of life.  We are a living being or soul or person.  This is the consistent view of our humanity throughout the bible- we are embodied souls.  Nancy Pearcy, in her book “Love Thy Body”, says “Christianity holds that body and soul form an integrated unity- that the human being is an embodied soul.” 

We are formed by the hands of a Creator who is a master craftsman.  This is what the word “formed” in Genesis 2.7 means.  

Isaiah 64.8 

“Yet you, LORD, are our Father.  

We are the clay, you are the potter; 

we are all the work of your hand.” 

 
Yet we have forgotten the potter’s hand and forgotten we are clay. As we hustle along in life we tend to treat our bodies more like machines, all in the goal of achieving and accumulating more.  Jefferson Bethke opposes this idea, “We aren’t shiny machines trying to get newer and better software updates.  We are earthen vessels of dust with the very Spirit of God in us.”  He longs and looks for something more, “…to be more than an efficient, driven, ambitious, goal-oriented, achievement-based human.  When I see that person in the future, I don’t see a loving human presence.  I see a machine.”

Nancy Pearcy suggests that one reason we do this is that, since Darwin’s ideas on nature, we are prone to think matter is without any intrinsic meaning or purpose. “For if nature was not the handiwork of God- if it no longer bore signs of God’s good purposes- then it no longer provided a basis for moral truths.  It was just a machine, churning along by blind material forces.”  

Being honest, as I reflect, I can identify with this.  Too often I have given my body over, like a machine, to do the work that is created in a mind full of ideas and a heart with strong desires for more.  In so doing I have in some way lost touch with my own body.  I have become disconnected and fragmented within myself, as I have become disconnected from the bible’s picture of being an embodied soul.  I have been distanced from the hands of my Creator and lived like the power to change lies in my hands. 

This distance has been covered by the God who has come near.  Jesus is the eternal God, the Word, who takes on flesh.  In becoming truly human he too is an embodied soul- who lived and then tasted death that I might be restored and indwelt.    
In light of this, the apostle Paul speaks of Christians as jars of clay who have a great treasure within.  Clay jars were pretty ordinary and commonplace.  They were also fragile and needed to be handled with care.  Here is the humbling reminder that I am weaker than I would ever dare to admit.  The treasure within is the power and life of Jesus who lives in us. Our challenges and weakness are the way Christians carry around His death and also display His life as we depend on Him.  Our bodies are where He has chosen to make HIs home.  

There is the hope of an actual body that awaits in the life to come in the new heaven and new earth that will be no longer weak or diseased but healthy and strong. Immortal. For now, however, life and our bodies have limits.  

This has been one of the greatest lessons I’ve learned in my recovery.  My energy was unpredictable and limited and I had to pay attention to it and make choices in how to spend it.  In the earliest days to choose the moments and ways I could spend time with my family and then need to rest.  In more recent days to pay attention to when I become am more irritable or strained and show signs of tiredness.  I am more conscious and even curious as to how my body is doing on day to day basis.  I am glad I have learned my body has limited resources- just like my bank account!- so I’d be wise to choose well how I spend it.  

We are clay, not machines.  

Our bodies need to be handled with care 

as we make our way through life.  

As we connect and are more conscious of our bodies- 

especially in times of weakness- 

hear the invitation to be kind to yourself and to find rest in placing yourself 

in the potters hands.