Guest Post-Rock Your Body!!

Dear Stella,

I wanted to share something with you. It’s a letter to a man who was not attracted to my body GASP! My own personal nightmare, right???? But it is this sort of friction that brings revelation and healing. Your post about loving your body is exactly what this letter is all about…you may post parts of it if you think it will help you or anyone else who reads…It is very personal, but ah! What is life if not sharing our personal moments to create movement?

Readers--I just had to post the whole thing. It's from one of the strongest, most beautiful and talented women I am privileged to know.

Dear Love,

Today I took a bath. I used that fizzy bath bomb my mom sent me for Christmas and I cried the kind of tears that shake the soul. I contemplated the imperfections of my body, the soft hills and sharp angles and I wondered why God would make me go through this earthlife with such a flawed, wreck of a vessel. And just when I thought the pain would overtake me, an analogy came to my heart.

I am a burn victim, but I’ve been on fire from the inside out, like a microwave from a very young age. When I was a little girl, I was sexually abused. I didn’t even remember it until I was much older, but it affected many aspects of my development both emotionally and physically. I abused my own body in my attempts to anesthetize and make sense of a seemingly fractured world. I separated myself from my body – it was a ‘thing’ that I could blame for everything. That way, I kept my spirit safe. But you and I know that we are meant to be whole. The purpose of this entire earth life is to have a spirit and a body together…working together.

God needs me whole so I can do his work. And so I’ve been running into the fire, pulling myself out one charred limb at a time. An arm here, a calf there, and eventually the piece that would put it all back together again; my heart. The Savior has been my surgeon and like other burn victims, the reconstruction doesn’t happen in one fell swoop. It is a process…the greatest process of my life. But it has left me bruised, swollen, lumpy, soft in places that the world tells me I shouldn’t be.

The thing is, I’m proud of this body. I’m proud of my strong shoulders, my muscular calves that have walked through fires, and borne me up with I didn’t have any other strength. I’m proud of my cracking, bungled, arthritic knees that so quickly bend to worship my Savior and my soft belly- a monument to my willingness to change, forgive, stay soft though life has not always been easy or kind. My body is a work in progress and it is certainly not perfect by any standard, but this is why I love it. And this is why loving me means loving all of me. Because I am not separate from my body. Without this particular vessel, I would not be the woman I am. It was a gift from a loving and merciful father who teaches us in the ways that are most meaningful to each of us as individuals.

This part is important: In sharing these thoughts, I do not seek any particular outcome. You are under no obligation to see my body the way I do. We didn’t even know of each other’s existence when this plan was set into motion and you are not responsible for reconciling the consequences of my years of self-abuse. I can not and do not expect that of you. What I do hope is that you can understand how I can love myself as I am and why I must be careful in my desire to please someone else where my body is concerned. I do want to be and fully intend to get as healthy and as strong as I can. And I will continue to work hard, but there will always be ‘scars’ from my battle.

In the end, the initial revelation that I received when we first talked about the lack of attraction still stands, “don’t worry about it’ seems to patiently flood my veins in moments when it all seems too overwhelming to bear. The admonition is a mantra borne of my deep and abiding faith in the healing power of Jesus Christ. I will have peace because ultimately He paid the price for it and through repentance (and I consider my process toward a healthy, strong body and away from self-abuse to be a repentance process of sorts) I am made whole. I am connected to that great power which makes me full of love for myself including my body and by extension you and the rest of the world.

I am so grateful that you are the man that you are and I hope that in the span of our relationship, I can recognize the fissures and pressures that have shaped the rock of your faith with all of your unique crags and fixtures. I’m glad for your honesty; it opens doors to a depth that is otherwise impossible to explore.