My body is a temple

I have recently finished a trial course with Zest 4 Life which is a diet and health regime which has done wonders for me - I have lost weight, and feeling a whole lot better. The regime works, and I would recommend investigating it to anyone else who want to lose weight and/or improve their sense of well being.

Enough of the advertising! Because that is not what I want to talk about. It struck me that the churches - in fact, Christians as a whole - tend to be poor at talking about looking after the body. We seem to limit it to "not doing harm", so drugs and self-harm are considered bad things, but reasonable amounts of alcohol and processed food are OK. Tattoos and smoking are somewhere in the middle, with strongly divided opinion on them.

I think that interpretation of the biblical teaching is mistaken in two ways.

Firstly, by identifying things which are considered "unacceptable", we dismiss the people who do them far too often, especially if they persist. I would bet that in your church, if you have one and it has more than 50 people connected to it, there is at least one person who self-harms, or has self-harmed, and cannot admit this to the church for fear of rejection. And I can be certain that there is at least one person with tattoos and one who smokes, not matter what your official position. By identifying there as "bad things", we fail to deal with the people who do them. From a personal point of view, I am more concerned about helping people whatever and wherever they are, irrespective of their behaviour and actions. Drugs and self-harm are damaging the body we have, deliberately and explicitly, so I would want to ask why, rather than just say stop.

The other side is that the church so often supports and even promotes body damage. We serve coffee after services, and accept that some people will drink a lot of coffee in their day, and ignore the fact that it is also a drug, and one that is very hard to break from. We do not find out about or promote the concepts that I have been learning, which is that the right foods make our body work better. And there is almost certainly in your church someone who drinks too much coffee and someone who eats too much, or too badly. And both of them will suffer for this at some point in their lives.

But I am not suggesting that the churches start diet courses or anything, just that there is teaching and messages, like this one, that are an important part of my Christian life, but are never touched on within the church. We miss out on some important lessons. Maybe we focus too much on denial and/or celebration, and miss out living normally.