The mosaic of God

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but: there is no wrong way to have a body.

I know that social media and culture and sometimes even the voice in our own heads tells us that there’s a “right” body, an “ideal” body – and that we must be damaged goods if we’re unable to conform to it. That our body must be a mistake if it’s not the same as what the world deems as “good.”

But can I tell you an ancient and beautiful story? In the beginning, there was nothingness, and in the beginning, God said to one another, “Let us make humans in our image.” And then God envisioned and imagined and created bodies. There were bodies with skin the color of clay and the color of fresh milk and the color of rose petals and the color of an inky midnight sky. There were bodies with dimpled buttocks and doughy bellies; bodies with taut thighs and bulging biceps; bodies with angled cheekbones and jutting ribs. There were bodies that loved women and bodies that loved men and bodies that loved both and bodies that loved neither. There were bodies with extra chromosomes, and bodies with missing limbs, and bodies with two seeing eyes; or maybe one or maybe none. There were bodies tall as tree trunks and bodies short and squat like mushrooms. There were bodies that felt at home being female, and bodies that felt at home being male, and some bodies felt at home being both, or neither, or somewhere in between. There were bodies with eyes like rich cocoa and icy glaciers and deep forests, bodies with hair like fine straw and bodies with hair like the swell of a wave, and bodies with lots of hair and bodies with very little.

And God saw them all, and God declared them very, very good.

Our bodies were purpose-fully, wonder-fully made by a God who dreamed them exactly as they are as a direct representation of who God is. Body diversity is a glorious gift that gives us glimpses of the divine in every single person’s flesh and bone. God didn’t just make white, thin, abled, cishet bodies because the image of God is a beautiful mosaic and not a uniform pencil-sketch. Black bodies, brown bodies, disabled bodies, trans bodies, nonbinary bodies, fat bodies – these bodies all bear the image of God who made them in God’s own image. And so when we reject them, we’re rejecting God.

There is no wrong way to have a body, no matter what anyone else – or sometimes even yourself – tells you.
You are very, very good, friend. God says so.

// A word of God for the people of God.

(Photo is a selfie taken by my beautifully, wonderfully made daughter – a closeup of her one seeing eye with a glimpse of her blind eye in the peripheral.)