I Treated It Like Luggage

You do not have a bad relationship with your body. You do not have one at all.

That is the thing to see first, because it is not what anybody expects. You are not at war with it. War would require some kind of engagement. What you have is a piece of equipment that gets you from one obligation to the next, and which you notice only when it fails to perform.

Luggage. That is honestly the closest word. Something to be got through the day and set down at night, and complained about occasionally when it is heavy, and otherwise not thought about at all.

And here is what that has cost, and it is not health and it is not appearance. It is that a very large part of your own life has been outside your own attention for decades. You have not been unkind to it. You have been absent from it.

Let me put the plain thing first. You have not been careless with any of this. You have gone at the size question repeatedly, in ways nobody knows about, and you have gotten up after every attempt. Somebody who did not care would not have gone at it at all.

So this page is not going to give you a plan and it is not going to ask you to love anything.

I want to show you a verse where a person has three parts and all of them are named.

Absence is not hostility

Consider the difference, because most of what is written about this assumes hostility.

Hostility involves attention. A man at war with his body thinks about it constantly. This is something else, and it is much quieter and much more common in men and almost never described: an arrangement in which the body is functionally invisible except as a source of problems.

You cannot be kind to something you are not present to. That is why every instruction about being kinder to yourself has bounced off. There was nobody there to receive it.

You have been absent rather than hostile, and no kindness has ever once been able to land on somebody who is not present. First Thessalonians 5:23 says your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a verse that lists all three land on a man who has been running on one.

And notice what the invisibility has done to the fixing attempts. Every one of them was aimed at an object rather than at a part of yourself, which is why they had the character of maintenance rather than of care. You have serviced it. You have never lived with it.

You have been servicing a thing rather than living with a part of yourself, and no maintenance has ever once been the same thing as care. The written word names spirit and soul and body together with one verb over all three, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a list like that arrive as an inventory of a man.

Spirit and soul and body

Paul writes a benediction at the end of a letter and he is careful about the parts.

And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Thessalonians 5:23, King James Version)

Spirit and soul and body. Three named. And one verb over all of them, and the verb is preserved, and the qualifier is whole.

Paul is not ranking them. He is not saying two are important and the third is transport. He puts them in one sentence under one act of God, which means the third one is inside the blessing rather than carrying the other two to it.

You have a third part inside the blessing, and no body has ever once been the transport for the parts that mattered. First Thessalonians 5 names all three under one verb, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a benediction into an inventory a man can take.

And read the word wholly at the start of it. Sanctify you wholly. The wholeness is the request. Paul is not asking for the good bits to be dealt with. He asks for all of it, together, as one man.

You are being asked for as one man, and no part of you has ever once been left off the request. The Spirit of God is the one who makes wholeness feel like a description rather than an aspiration, and the written word says the very God of peace sanctify you wholly.

Say all three came home

Now the part I came to say, and it is deliberately unspiritual.

At the end of today, sit down and say out loud that all three of you came home. Spirit, soul, and body. Say the three words.

Then do one small kind thing for the third one. Not a plan. One thing. Sit down properly instead of standing. Take the boots off. Drink some water. Put the heat on. Whatever the actual small thing is that a man would do for somebody who had worked all day.

You have a part of you that came home too, and no third of a man has ever once been left in the truck. The written word names all three under one preserving, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an inventory like that possible at the end of an ordinary day.

And here is why saying it out loud does more than thinking it. The absence has been maintained by silence. There has never been a sentence in your house that included your body as a person rather than as equipment. One sentence changes the census.

You have a census that now includes all of you, and no silence has ever once been able to survive being spoken into. The Spirit of God is the one who gets a third part named out loud, and 1 Thessalonians 5:23 is the written word underneath it, where spirit and soul and body are preserved together and the whole man is asked for.