Photograph by Jernej Graj via Unsplash

Remember
Remember your BODY
Remember your BODY as THREE IN ONE

THAT BODY
THIS BODY
NEXT BODY

HOLD YOUR BODY
REMEMBER IT IS YOUR BODY
NOT THE WORLD’S

HOLD OUR BODY
PLACE [Y]OUR HANDS
ON [Y]OUR FACE
[Y]OUR CHEEKS
[Y]OUR EARS
ACROSS [Y]OUR EYES. THEN LIPS

YOU NEXT HOLD OUT YOUR
HANDS FOR THE RAIN
TO CATCH, LAP UP HYDRATION IN SIPS
THEN GULPS AND GULPS

HOLD [Y]OUR BODY
YOUR BREASTS
YOUR STOMACH THAT GROWLS
ARMS STRETCHED. NEXT
READY FOR FLIGHT

Remember
Remember your BODY
THIS BODY. RESCUED YOU FROM THAT BODY
MADE THIS BODY, HOLD ON FOR THE NEXT

SHOW YOU IN YOUR OWN WAY
JUST HOW THE PEOPLE COULD FLY

THIS BODY MINES THE SACRED
THIS BODY MINDS THE SACRED
THIS BODY IS A SPACE TO EXIST

Beauty’s appetite for liberation
Where longing thickens
Remember
….Remember to Survive.[i]

A dear friend and sister-in-ministry recently said to me, “It’s hard to be in a body.” Her words affirm my embodied reality that’s shifted significantly since I was born. By looking at me, most people cannot tell that I am plagued by semi-chronic back pain and have a different brain than I did before I went crashing into the back of a Mercedes at the end of 2020. In the wake of that car accident, I found myself unable to sit comfortably like I used to and found that my brain could not capture nearly as many strings of words as it used to, though it’s improved slightly. Since then, sitting has never felt quite the same and taking notes by hand is more challenging than it’s ever been.

My classes at divinity school, which averaged about two hours, were daily challenges to my body’s limits. If it were up to me, I would’ve brought a yoga mat to class so I could move through various postures that are kinder to my spine than chairs and desks that are hardly ergonomic and certainly not one-size-fits-all. When my professors and classmates articulated complex strings of thoughts, I often struggled to capture their verbalized expressions of intellect in their entirety. Writing papers was often, quite literally, painful.

Because of my body’s limitations, I’ve become acutely aware of how much the world is not built to accommodate, let alone be kind to differently-abled bodies and bodies that are disabled. Church pews happen to be the closest thing there is to a one-size-fits-all seating apparatus. Some pews can seat 12 people, others 15 or 20. Pews do not require you to shrink yourself or squeeze into a seat that was never made with your hips or your thighs in mind. Pews welcome you, just as you are, to take up all the space you need — unless you’re dealing with an usher who’s convinced that pew can fit 25 people!

What most church sanctuaries do not offer are standing areas with high-top tables that would permit sermon notetakers like myself to comfortably take in the sermon without compromising our spinal health. This is also true of many coffee shops, libraries, classrooms, and co-working spaces. In her book My Body is Not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice in The Church, Amy Kenny writes:

People are not disabled because of bodily differences but because of systemic barriers in a society built around nondisabled people…Constructing buildings and communities with disabled people in mind from the outset produces a culture of belonging that does not discriminate against bodily difference. This model of disability is liberating, because it invites all of us, disabled and nondisabled people alike, to contribute to our neighbors’ inclusion and flourishing, regardless of physical differences.

The same dear friend who told me that it’s hard to be in a body also encouraged me to not be afraid to utilize wheelchairs and extra boarding time at the airport if that’s what my body needs that day. I travel fairly often for preaching engagements and ministry conferences, which can be hard on my body because of all the sitting. One week, I traveled to four cities via five different flights. When I choose to use a wheelchair, I’m often met with stares and looks of harsh skepticism that inaudibly say, “Does she even need a wheelchair?” And when I stand up to board the flight, some of those people’s jaws nearly hit the floor. But the reality is, my back, fatigued from sitting, often cannot bear to be saddled with my bags as I make my way down the long, long corridors of airports to my gate. Do folks forget that you can, quite literally, walk miles in airports?

They certainly don’t know that since my car accident at the end of 2020, walking on some days felt nearly impossible and on others, sitting was excruciatingly painful. I’ll never forget the kindness of friends who, when I was able to afford going to the chiropractor again, came over to make sure I didn’t fall getting in and out of the shower and who walked with me to get ice cream after bringing me some food to eat. A few blocks in, I began wincing, stopping to hold onto the stop sign for support. I’d been in bed all day, icing every two hours like the chiropractor instructed. But hours later, I needed to move, even if it hurt.

This body that I have is not like that body I used to have. This body is over 200 pounds. This body challenges what you think 200 pounds looks like. This body, with two repaired ACLs, a healed collarbone, and a sensitive spine, carries the weight of being a Black, queer, neurodivergent woman in America in 2025. The brain within this body can no longer process words like it used to. The nervous system within this body refuses to metabolize stress like it used to. This body is no longer that body.

My relationship with my body is complicated. Because of adverse childhood experiences, I never quite felt at home within my own body until more recently. Since I was a child, others have made me feel uncomfortable about, unsafe in, and ashamed of my own body, to the point that I’d rarely spend time looking in the mirror or spend more than five minutes in the shower. In her book The Body is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love, Sonya Renee Taylor writes:

One of the most impactful, difficult, and underexplored ways we form early messages about our bodies is a result of abuse and trauma. Not only have we grown up in societies that shame difference and judge by the metric of body-based oppression, but many of us grew up navigating personal physical and sexual harm. These memories can shape how we understand touch, pleasure, pain, and whether we experience our bodies as sites of safety or danger. When physical and sexual abuse happen in our childhoods, we are far more likely to personalize the harm, believing we must have done something to cause it. Survivors of abuse may often come to see their bodies as bad or wrong, blaming themselves and their physical form for the violations they endured. This internalization can set survivors on a lifetime path of body shame.

Verbal, mental, emotional, and spiritual abuse, violations, and criticism also deeply impact how we think, feel and treat our bodies. Physical, sexual, verbal, mental, emotional, or spiritual abuse are all forms of violence that attack our sacred Imago Dei. Sadly, our imago dei is frequently under attack through these forms of violence and by those who are responsible for it, the conditions that normalize violence, and the systems that support and protect them as perpetrators.

Perhaps paradoxically, it wasn’t until I chose to have an abortion in 2016 that I began to make peace with my body. Saddled by grief, with no tub to soak away my sorrows, I’d often sit on the floor of my shower and cry as the water washed over me. Those showers, no longer rushed five-minute obligations, became slow, sacred times where I’d have to slow down and tend to my body that was no longer carrying twin embryos. Choosing to forgo nine transformational months of pregnancy required me to reexamine my relationship with my body but perhaps more importantly, it required me to actually be in my body, rather than living outside of it as I’d done for many years as a coping mechanism. Taylor writes, “Making peace with your body is your mighty act of revolution…Moving from body shame to radical self-love is a road of inquiry and insight. We will need to ask ourselves tough questions from a place of grace and grounding.”

Grief grounded me. It quite literally sat me down and started asking me tough questions that I wouldn’t have faced or tried to answer if not catalyzed by my abortion. Why had I allowed myself to be in relationships and situationships that did not honor myself or my body? Why hadn’t I been able to fully realize and recognize the disembodying impacts of the traumas I’d experienced throughout my life? What was so bad or wrong about my body?

Certain expressions of Christianity render the body, perhaps articulated more frequently as “the flesh,” as at odds with our spirit — a liability for purity and a barrier to holiness and righteousness. Yet Paul, in 1 Corinthians 6:19, contends that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. Temples! In the Old Testament, temples are meticulously crafted and curated down to cubits. And Paul also asserts, “If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body…the spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual” (1 Corinthians 15:44, 46 NIV). The natural came first. If Jesus first loved us, ought we also learn how to love what came first? Before his divine transfiguration, Jesus made his way through this world first in a body, born of his mother Mary, just as we make our way through this world in bodies born of our mothers. Even the body of Jesus’ mother was subject to criticism and scrutiny, first by her fiancé Joseph, then by the community that saw her only as an unwed, pregnant teenager, rather than a holy temple and vessel of the Messiah. Ain’t that something? Mary wasn’t exempt from body shaming either. How might that have made her feel?

Taylor describes the -isms and phobias that degrade, disrupt, and diminish our views of ourselves and our bodies as algorithms:

Racism, sexism, ableism, homo-and transphobia, ageism, fatphobia are algorithms created by humans’ struggle to make peace with the body. A radical self-love world is a world free from the systems of oppression that make it difficult and sometimes deadly to live in our bodies. A radical self-love world is a world that works for every body. Creating such a world is an inside-out job. How we value and honor our own bodies impacts how we value and honor the bodies of others.

I am learning how to love myself and my body from the inside out. I challenge myself to affirm that I am indeed fearfully and wonderfully made. As a survivor of multiple forms of violence, I must work daily to re-member this here temple of mine. And I must also practice what it feels like to feel safe in my own body, in part by reclaiming colors and aesthetics that have made me feel unsafe. In my late 20s, to my mother’s shock, I asked her to buy me a pink purse. For the longest time, beginning in my childhood, pink equaled cute and cute felt unsafe. The pink purse purchased eventually turned into a pink shirt here and a pink dress there until I declared I’d entered what I called my full-blown Pink Era™.

Reclaiming pink for myself symbolized reclaiming my divine femininity that I’d sworn off around age 7 because of boys and men who did not honor my imago dei. I love and honor “Ryan The Tomboy” who protected me in my childhood and who buffered me from a world that was not ready for my queerness. And now, I honor the brave softness of this version of myself that dares to experiment with what “sexy” might look and feel like. And before you go sit in your judgment seat — yes, Christians can be sexy! But that’s an article for another day.

You, child of God, are fearfully and wonderfully made, divinely crafted from the crown of your head to the soles of your feet. Your insides are good, real good. You are not the worst things that anyone has said or done to you, even if those people were your own family or friends. You never, ever, deserved any of it. Selah. This body is sacred. That body was sacred. And so shall your next body be. Remember to survive, yes, but also, dear child of God — remember to thrive. Do not let the memories of trauma be the ones that define you or your relationship with your body. Amen.