Monday, August 16, 2010

Who's Temple?

Don't you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God?  You do not belong to yourself, for God bought you with a high price.  So you must honor God with your body.  1 Corinthians 6:19-20

There is a term I recently heard.  Deconditioning.  When we work on something, either to maintain or improve, we are conditioning it.

Physical deconditioning is:  Cause to lose fitness or muscle tone, especially through lack of exercise.

In psychiatry, the term is:  Re-form or reverse previously conditioned behavior, especially in the treatment of phobia and other anxiety disorders in which the fear response to certain stimuli brought under control.

There was a time when I read these verses and just read them as don't commit a sin against your body, God's temple.  "Committing" sounds like an "action verb," taking steps toward sin.  But I've come around to the belief that doing nothing is also an active sin against His temple.

There are so many ways we decondition the body.  Inactivity, is obvious.  Overeating, another obvious choice.  But our minds--this is where so much of the deconditioning takes place.  We don't just find ourselves on the couch, no we had to consciously think about how to get there and where to plop down. We don't just find ourselves with aching joints that carry too much weight, we made conscious decisions to get us to that point.  We don't just find ourselves with aching joints, underweight, by accident.  We have made conscious decisions to not eat and to not train our bodies to get up and move.

One moment for me, when this started clicking in my mind was reading about Phillip running along side the chariot.  At the time I read that, I realized I couldn't even run to the mailbox!  So, at that time, my goal was to train myself to run to the mailbox.  I didn't set my goals any higher than that.  I met the goal and that was it for a few years.  Yes, years.

That's my first post.  I have lots of snippets in my brain for future posts and it is difficult to not put them in this post, but I'm trying to train myself to not let my randomness run rampant on this blog.  Thanks for your patience.

Cindy Q