Ashamed Of My Own Body

The cardigan lives on the back of the bedroom door.

It is a heavy one, long, the sleeves down past the wrist. It has been there so long that the door has a mark on it. In November nobody thinks anything of it. In July it is a decision she makes at ten to eight every morning while she is still standing in her socks, and she has made it so many thousands of times that it does not feel like a decision any more. It feels like getting dressed.

She takes it off in her own house, when the door is locked and the blinds are down and there is nobody in.

That is the shape of it, and you will notice there is nothing dramatic here. Nobody has said anything cruel to her in years. There is no villain in this story. There is a woman, a cardigan, a mark on a door, and a rule she has never once said out loud, which goes: this must not be seen.

You have your own version. It might be sleeves. It might be the photographs you are not in, or the way you always find a reason to be holding something in front of you, or a mirror in a bathroom that you use only from the neck up. It might be a scar. It might be a shape that changed and never changed back, or a body that used to do things it cannot do now, or skin that behaves in a way you would not have chosen. It might be something done to this body by somebody else, which was never yours in the first place and which you have been carrying anyway.

And under all of it there is a sentence, and I am going to say it plainly because you have never been able to, and hearing it said out loud by somebody who is not disgusted is part of what breaks it.

The sentence is: there is something wrong with the actual body I have to live in, and I cannot get away from it, because I am in it.

You are safe here. That sentence has just been said in a room where nobody flinched.

He did not move in to a house He was ashamed of

Shame is different from guilt and the difference is the whole of this message.

Guilt says: I did something bad. Guilt has a doorway out of it, and most of us have been taught where the doorway is. Shame says something else entirely. Shame says: I am something bad. And when the shame has attached to your body, it goes one step worse again, because a body is not a thing you did, it is a thing you are, and you cannot repent of a rib.

That is why it has not shifted. You have been trying to apply the medicine for guilt to a wound made of shame, and it has not worked, and then you have concluded that the problem must be you. It is not. You were reaching for the wrong bottle.

So let me put a different sentence next to yours. Not an encouragement, a fact, and a strange one:

What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's.1 Corinthians 6:19, 20

Stop at the first clause and think about who is speaking to whom. Paul is writing to the Corinthian church, which was, by any reading of that letter, an absolute shambles. These were not people with impressive bodies or impressive histories. And he tells them that the Spirit of God has taken up residence in the bodies they actually have.

Not the bodies they would like. Not the repaired version, the younger version, the unmarked version. The one currently wearing the cardigan.

God does not live in you provisionally. He is not waiting in the hall until the renovations are finished. There is no clause anywhere in Scripture where the Holy Spirit says He will make a home in a person once the person is presentable. He moved in. And He knew, before He crossed the threshold, everything about this body that you would spend years hoping nobody notices, because you cannot surprise Him with a fact about His own house.

Now hold the two sentences together, because they cannot both be true.

Yours: this must not be seen.

His: I have made my home here, and I have paid for it.

One of those is a rule you were handed by a moment, or a person, or a slow accumulation of small things, and you have kept it faithfully for years at real cost. The other is the settled position of God about the same body. They cannot both be running the house.

And hear this, because it matters more than anything else in this message: you are not required to earn your way out of this. Nothing has to be confessed to another human being before you are allowed to stop hiding. You do not have to reach a certain weight, heal a certain scar, or feel differently about the mirror before the temple becomes a temple. It already is one. It was one this morning while you were pulling that cardigan off the door.