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When Your Temple’s Falling Apart
And it’s only supposed to get *worse* as you get older?
I always grew up with the aphorism “Your body is a temple . . .”
In the circles that I ran in (conservative, Evangelical Christian) that always meant that you shouldn’t do anything fun, like alcohol, or drugs, or sex, or swearing, or watching any movies above a PG rating, because your body is a dwelling place for Jesus, and you don’t want to make Jesus sad by . . . what, being human?
It took a long time to unlearn the idea of my body being a temple — that it’s okay to do all of those things. But now I’m beginning to get my feeling that maybe my body is a temple — an ancient ruin full of rotting ghosts and booby traps and beginning to fall apart with exposure to the elements.
Obviously, my body has never been my friend. I’ve been overweight since I was 12 months old or so, and by the time I was old enough to be in control of my body, I was a fat kid — basically, my weight was a runaway train, and I had no way in hell of stopping it.
But just when I think that I’m finally getting a handle on things — clearing the clutter out of some of the excess rooms, if you catch my drift — the entire basement collapses into the ground.
