You Matter

A Meditation On the Human Body

“How Did God Create Man?”

“God made man, male and female, in His image.

God made Adam from the dust of the earth, and formed the woman from Adam’s side.”

In our home, we start each school day with prayer, scripture, poetry, and a catechism question to either review or memorize. Last week, we covered the creative work of God in making mankind, and this, along with remembering good books and turning another year older, sparked the following essay.

“What does it mean to be made in the image of God?” I am asking a child, so naturally I’m bracing for any type of response. For now, she is silent.

“When you feed the chickens or eat dinner or play outside with the neighbors; what does the image of God have to do with any of that?”

She does not know. Instead of writing an essay, I give her a two word answer:

“You matter.”

“Oh,” she grins. “That’s nice.”

“How much of you matters? All of you?”

“Yes, all of me.” No hesitation there.

“What about your nose? Does it matter?” This is where it gets fun. “Do you think your nose is important?”

She is silent.

“Do you think your hair matters?”

“Yes.” Obviously a little girl thinks hair matters. “My hair matters a lot.”

“You’re right. Every part of you matters, a lot. Does your ear matter?” You need to, when teaching a child, ask questions, even if you just made a clear statement. The odds that this child is already far away in Narnia, holding a placid smile just so to appear as if she is listening, are great. Questions are a teachers invitation to come back to the moment.

“Yes, my ear matters.”

“This one too?”

“Yes.”

“Even your teeth?”

We are giggling now, which means the lesson is caught. Just in case, I circle the truth back into itself:

“But why do you matter?”

Genesis tells us that, while we matter, we are not the first things created to hold value. First, there is light, and it has meaning and value too. In his book, Through New Eyes, James B. Jordan presents the case for a vision of creation beyond the material. Instead of simply seeing a ball of gas, we should see the sun as a happy, strong man running a race, which, for those of us born in the last 100 years, requires new eyes. He masterfully applies meaning and symbolism to the created world. He is a brilliant academic and pastor, but his work affects 6 year-olds, which is my favorite kind of academic work.

It is because the created world has meaning beyond the physical that we tell our daughter:

“You may not squeeze the cat that tight. The cat is a created creature, a gift to our home, however simple and silly, from God. She is a delight to us because God sent her. She has meaning. You must learn to interact with her as if she did.”

The created world is the foundation. It is the mountain of God’s glory and wisdom, His ability on display in physically intricate and powerful ways, and at the top of creation, at the very peak, the breathtaking view of God’s creative glory is Man. The created world has meaning because it is made by God, and a little girl matters as the future queen over this world because she is made by God in His image.

Why do we tell children not to hit each other? Because if you do you’ll get hit back? After all, most of us learn on some level the adage: if you play dumb games; you win dumb prizes. For some of us, this is the sum total of our answer. We are always obsessing over the prize. What will you give me, God, if I believe you? What do I get out of this? How does this benefit me? It has to make sense, and I want some kind of worthwhile reward, otherwise, watch me swing!

Because his grace is so expansive and free, God does write blessings into his laws. We are less likely to be hit by the neighbor boy if we choose not to hit him every time he irritates us. There is a cause and effect rhythm to life. But if this is where we stay, we have missed everything. It is a tragedy of tragedies to believe we only obey in order not to be punished, when all along God is showing us wonders and beauties the human soul can only marvel and hope to understand.

In this life, we are not just trying to stay safe: we are trying all our days to catch and show the glory of God until these frail lives are traded for real ones. Don’t you see the dignity written into life? We are not to tell lies not just because it’s wrong but because we are a glorious and eternal creations of the living God.

You matter. Your tongue matters. Don’t let lies twist you into something utterly unlike what God has done. Don’t let it shadow the world. Don’t let it uglify the other people who matter. Refuse to lie about yourself or them because this invisible and visible glory saturating the whole world is worth glimpsing. This kind of seeing has nothing to do with staying out of trouble and everything to do with courage.

What part of you matters?

For some the answer is entirely spiritual: your soul matters. Welcome to meditation or prayer or some other mystical habit to give you internal peace. Of course, it isn’t that the soul doesn’t matter. The error is in believing it’s the ONLY thing that matters. For some the answer is entirely physical: your body matters. Welcome to health podcasts and diets and gyms. Again, this isn’t entirely wrong, only far too small in its vision of humanity. For most of us, we alternate between them both as it suits us. If I feel like waking up early to exercise, I suddenly theorize on the value of the body, and if I don’t; I become the happiest of pietists as I fall back asleep.

For the sake of simplicity, I would like to zero in on the body. In many ways, this is the area that most Americans despise. We do not like our bodies let alone love them. And though I know it sounds grating against the excess of self-love we are used to hearing, for many of us; we would do well to love our bodies better.

In her book, Love Thy Body, Nancy Pearcey gives the adult version of the answer my daughter is learning. She thoroughly examines the way Americans hate the human body, while carefully proving that a genuine Christian love of our bodies is the answer to much of our societal ills. When I tell my daughter, “You matter,” I am giving her Nancy Pearcey’s book in two words.

One of the many stories that Nancy tells has to do with a gentleman who is attracted to other men. Because of God’s grace, this man is radically saved and yet still carries this confusion of attraction. What is he to do? How can he be free from desires which he does not wish to have but has all the same? The gentleman explains that it was in submission to God’s created work in his body that he found freedom and a real joy in his wife. In his words, he stopped hating his body. He decided that in loving the telos that God had placed on his life through his DNA, he would submit himself and actively rejoice in being a man. The cure was not resistance as much as a wholehearted embrace of his XY chromosomes.

To be a man is to be made in a particular design. To be designed is to have a purpose, and there is only one other kind of human body that perfectly compliments a man’s body. That is a woman. Eve is made for Adam. Even the smallest child knows that men are designed to marry women. Even children raised by two men know this. Somewhere along the way, this gentleman lost sight of that. And he regained not just his sight but his joy and fruitfulness by looking in the mirror and loving what God had done.

The human body is sacred. If we thought that as a culture, it would change everything.

Nancy’s book was key in my own life story. Not too long ago, though it feels like ages, I faced a decision about my own children’s bodies. I was presented with the option of creating children through a process called in vitro fertilization. You’ve probably heard of it by now. For many, many reasons my husband and I said no, but at the core of why we said no was love for the human body. We could not experiment on the human bodies of our own children and sleep well at night. It was really that simple.

I could not freeze my child’s body, however insignificant and tiny they were, knowing it had such a high probability of harming them. It is bad for the human body to be frozen, and it is weird that one has to write that. I couldn’t do it. I looked into a microscope and saw the human body at its smallest and frailest moment.

“I can’t bring myself to freeze my child,” I once said in conversation. “But it isn’t a child,” is the response. “It’s just a clump of cells.” One can debate till they’re blue in the face, but what both sides agree on is what kind of cells. They are human cells. The blastocyst is a human body.

The difference will always be that one sees cells without meaning and one sees cells with meaning. One says the human body doesn’t matter or even that it doesn’t matter as much as my desire for children matters. And the other says, “No, the human body does matter just as much as my own body matters, and I have decided to love it.”

Most of us really want a world of order again. We want a Congress that knows what a woman is, and we want men who marry the women, and we want the good and joyful life of God’s created world. What I would give to live in a world where we did not kill, sell, objectify, mutilate, or experiment on the human body. But we don’t want the changes that lead to that kind of world. We don’t, for all our self-love talk, want to believe that what God has done in our bodies is good. How do I know?

It is difficult to get into specifics in a culture like ours. How do I specifically prove to you that most of us don’t really value the body? It seems obvious, intuitive, instinctive. Have you ever spent a Saturday on the beach? We do all sorts of unusual things to our bodies, but we do not love them. No, we are more like children ripping toys from their parent’s hands. We want our bodies to belong to us; to be allowed to do whatever we want without constriction or discernment. That’s not love though. That’s called control, and our problem is, we want control without learning how to love.

Some of us aren’t really seeking control as much as the ability to blend in. We want to belong, fit in with our peers, and be accepted. We do all sorts of things to our bodies in order to assuage our insecurities. How often have I seen a young woman in a bikini on the beach during a freezing cold day? She is not comfortable. She is not happy. She is simply doing what she thinks she has to do with her body in order to be “normal.” That is also not a love of the body. That is fear.

The problem with loving our bodies is that it requires us to follow the implications of honor. If your skin matters, then what you do with that skin matters too. The logical conclusion of a person who loves their skin means they are no longer free to do whatever comes to mind. The earlobes are not neutral ground.

You, from the first day of your existence, have held an inherent honor that comes with restrictions. Kings have honor, but they are not free. If a King could do whatever he pleased he would not be a King. He would be a tyrant. Pastors have honor, but they too must not assume they can do whatever they like. Otherwise, they will quickly turn into cult leaders. You have honor, your skin and nerve endings and thoughts and feelings, but you are not free.

What would we change if we believed we mattered?

Let me give you something small but specific in my own life that I made a decision on because I believe my skin is more than cells roped together.

Today I am 33 years-old. Age is changing my memories, and now instead of seeing one coherent childhood, I find the past is broken and scattered. It is more like a black sheet with photographs hanging, the few shots I still remember. If I pull one off, it lights up into a scene, and one such scene is the memory of my Mother’s hands.

I am laying on her lap in church. The pastor drones, and I am bored. I pick up a hand and study it. In my memory, it blotches as I press the skin, white and red just resting beneath the pores. It is a hand just about to turn old, with hints of wrinkles that still disappear when she clenches. The nails are short, the skin stretchy, and white cracks break in the rubbery gulf between her fingers. It is small and strong, a working woman’s hand. It has soaked in hot, soapy water, dried in the soil, and wiped endless bottoms. The kind of hand to horrify a Victorian. I think it’s lovely, and for the first time in my memory I feel a longing.

“When I am old, really old, I hope I have hands like this,” I think to myself. But I am just a child, and my Mother, who feels so old to me then, must’ve been in her thirties. How do I know? Because I have those hands now, and every time I look down at them, I see my Mom’s. I go back to those blue cushioned chairs, and try to see something else. I can’t. It is only her hands I remember wanting. I blinked, and they dangled at my side. My knuckles wrinkle just like hers did. What are my Mom’s hands doing on me?

My face is changing too. Sometimes I stumble across a photo from a few years back and marvel at the change. I can tell that I am changing. I glance at my Mom who is no longer thirty, and I wonder, “Is that going to be my face one day?” I’m not against looking like my Mom. In fact, I hope I age as well as she has, but I am, if I’m honest, a little scared. What will it be like to blink and be sixty? I once, just for second, looked up a product called: Frownies. “I know you can’t change this,” I think. “But what if I could delay it?”

What would I be delaying? What would I be trading if I could keep my hands and face from the evidence of life? These hands, my Mother’s hands, are the link between me and my own daughter’s Grandma. Here I stand at the grand view between 6 and 60, the eternal string between two eternal women. It is too much for a 6 year-old to believe she will one day be 60. Instead, she dreams of 30 as the moment when she will be grown up, and what would those dreams be if I distorted them by erasing the work of God upon my skin? Would I rob my own daughter of seeing the story in her own Mama’s smile? Doesn’t every little girl need a few more wrinkled smiles to gaze at before she faces her own future? Doesn’t she deserve to see how her hands will be one day before she faces the work and sorrows and joys between 6 and 30?

I believe my skin matters in a way I can’t fully capture, but enough that I refuse to change it. In some small way, if we want a world where Congress knows what a woman is, we need to love being women.

Let me be explicit. I do not think that if you use Frownies, you are wrong. The state of your mind is beyond my wisdom, and I do not believe that we are all called to the same response. You should not feel guilty about using Frownies. My point is, why would I use them? For me, I can’t find a way to agree with God’s work in my body and erase my wrinkles. But that’s me. I would not have you throw away your Frownies, but to embrace what God has done in your skin. What you do with that rejoicing is up to you.

Too often men are creatures who say things they don’t believe and believe things they won’t say. When I listen to the words of Schaefer, Lewis, Pearcy, Leithart, Jordan; I find myself remembering that this world is made. I am made. To be made by God is to matter, all of me, and this glorious position of human woman comes with a telos. I don’t always have the wisdom to live that telos out in a logical and holy manner, but I, as I hope for my own daughter, believe that to live as if my body mattered and your body mattered, is the goal.

What would you change if you believed you mattered? Your speech? Would you dye your hair purple if you believed that the brown God gave you had sacred telos? What if you thought your skin mattered? Would you cover it up or ink it or expose it? What would you do with your face if the goal was to look like the woman God made and shaped and aged? What about sleep? Would you consume energy drinks and laugh off caution as fundamental fud-duddery if you thought sleep was His beloved gift? What if your thoughts mattered? What would you fill your mind with if you thought the mind was sacred? Are you brave enough to love what God has done in a world that hates it?

Sin is many lies, but one lie within its fold is this: it doesn’t matter. You don’t matter. They don’t matter.

Faith is then on some level the response: “Yes, I do.” And it’s best if you say it with your shoulders squared, your head high, and eyes full of the defiance of a child who knows who their Father is.

There is a catch. We all like to hear that we matter. We all want to have value. As much as I believe we live in an age that hates itself, I also believe that we long to be loved, and that love, more than anything else, draws us. I long for a world where people matter. But it doesn’t and never will exist apart from the Creator. You matter BECAUSE God is real. He made you in His image, and He knows best how to reveal His glory and protect your dignity. You must, if you want the world where people matter, submit to Him.

“What does it mean that we are made in God’s image?

It means we are made to reflect God’s knowledge, righteousness, and holiness as we rule over his creation.”