When the World is at War, Letting Ourselves Go isn't Noble
Why paying attention to your body now is not selfish, but significant.
10 years ago I wrote a blog post that eventually became my book Put Your Warrior Boots On.
When the time came for my agent to pitch this book to publishers, no one wanted it. I remember very vividly her coming back after the first 7 places rejected it. The feedback was almost always the same:
“They don’t understand the cause for concern that the book addresses. They feel like the readers won’t need what the book offers: help to walk strong no matter what happens to or around them — because the world really isn’t that unstable.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Did we live in the same world?
Finally, after many “no’s” one publisher said “yes.” We negotiated on the subtitle. I could keep the first part “Walking Strong…” so long as I softened the last part “in a World Gone Crazy” since, after all, the world surely wasn’t that.
The premise of the book was about preparation. 8 declarations we are able to make when we know Jesus and know the Word of God and how the story ends no matter what happens in our earthly lifetime.
I started off the book with a story about an experience I had walking in Colorado with a friend and how the elevated conditions + my out-of-shapeness made me question if I could make it even one more step.
Yet common sense told me that if I wanted to get back to where we were staying, unless I planned to spend the night outside with whatever animals were out there to have me for a snack, I had no choice but to put one foot in front of the other and get back home.
That experience taught me a great lesson: wishing away the conditions of the world right in front of me would do no good.
Instead, I needed to prepare myself for them — spiritually, mentally and physically. I simply needed to “get in shape.” That way, when the inevitable hard conditions came, I would no longer be ill-equipped.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but the preparatory message would surely come in handy 10 years later when we are quite literally on the verge of a world war.
And in many ways, unbeknownst to me, I was also teeing up the message of Body & Soul — an equally crucial message for these times.
Because without being well and whole, from the inside out — our complete embodied self — we will not be ready to weather the troubles of this world — mind, body and soul. We will simply be “out of shape.”
And yet sometimes, when we are in major crisis like our current global one, even taking care of ourselves can feel selfish and insignificant.
But it’s critical for us to do so. Because we cannot be the people we need to be in every sense if we are not well, body and soul.
If we are too sick to serve, too unwell to think straight, immobilized in our sin and suffering, we will not be the warriors we were meant to be.
This is the moment not to let ourselves go in false nobility, but instead to rise up and remember that even in our very creation, despite the difficulties of this world, we were made for so much more.
ps: Close Circle Community, I am going to send one of you a free book and Bible study, so keep reading!