Bodily Health is Load-Based

A brother from our church small group recently completed a juice fast a couple of weeks ago. When he started to eat solid foods again, he had pain and trouble with chewing.

The human body is amazingly resilient in its design. It adapts to the forms with which we shape it, bending without breaking in so many ways. Our constituent living materials replace themselves regularly at the cellular level. Only when the replacement rate of the cells slows do our bodies deteriorate. Observing my own body and my family’s bodies healing is truly awe-inspiring for me. Broken things get made new with just a few simple inputs and the breath of life.

God designed your body very specifically for life on earth. The gravitational pull and directionality of your limbs partially dictates the size of your lungs, the growth of your fingernails, the size of your bones, the elasticity of your skin. The lunar cycle matches the menstrual cycle with amazing precision. You breathe air. You are mostly made of water and so it the surface of the earth. You need salt. Did we mention the earth’s water is saline too? Not a coincidence.

But it’s not just the materials of earth and the pull of heavenly bodies that affect our overall health. Did you know that even if you have all of the calcium, magnesium, zinc, and other necessary ingredients for making healthy bones, that if you don’t load your body to signal the bone-making awesomeness to do its bone-making processes, that you won’t make bone? Your body is designed to operate in earth gravity, and to stay active and load-bearing. This is one of the reasons doctors prescribe load bearing exercise to those of us who are prone to osteoporosis.

Back to our juice friend. Without the forces of chewing going through his teeth and jaws, friend’s body didn’t keep signaling his chewing system to stay strong. At the cellular level, all of our tissues themselves (not just muscles) can atrophy without fuel, proper nerve signaling, or mechanical loads. The same principles hold true for deficiencies in our spiritual bodies.

In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church he writes about the parts of the body needing one another, belonging, and showing honor to the less public parts. You may have heard of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians which describes the body growing up into the stature of the mature head, Christ, and that when all of the parts are working together properly, the body grows and it builds itself up in love.

I marvel at how our physical bodies point to the spiritual Body of Christ in such detail. The function of the local church, her maturity, and her growth all depend on healthy DNA (doctrine), every member’s nourishment (of our faith, through God’s Word), nerve signaling and proper function (in accordance with the Holy Spirit, our place and gifts, and in the context of keeping those relational joints healthy),  and on proper loading.

Perhaps the American church at large today isn’t healthy or isn’t growing because her parts aren’t all participating as they should. Perhaps some parts feel left out while others arrogantly take over roles and responsibilities they shouldn’t. Maybe some need breath, or the bread of life. Others have severed their connection from the nervous system, dulled to receiving and sending vital messages for function. But perhaps . . . some parts of the body just aren’t being loaded properly.

In engineering, structural loads are forces, deformations, or accelerations applied to members. These loads cause internal stress, movement, transfer to other members, or cause deformation. True Life in Christ is full of these kinds of loads. The kinds of loads that cause internal stress in the battle between flesh and spirit (see Romans 7), movement as we are motivated by an alien, compulsive love (see 2 Corinthians 5), the joints transferring loads properly in relation to one another (see Ephesians 4), and members being made strong  through training and discipline (see Hebrews 12). As a Body and as Members, we were meant to stay healthy, get stronger, and grow through spiritual load bearing.

So improve your bodily and your spiritual health. Stay connected to the head, and go ahead and take a healthy load on.