Body.

I strongly dislike video recordings, and I strongly dislike the sound of my own voice, but I'm biting the bullet so you can get in on the action.  The sacrifices I make. 

: )

I spent a good chunk of the morning relaxing & exercising, and then I spent the afternoon reading.  Normally I watch the news as well, but all they were talking about this afternoon was Cutler, the football game yesterday, and how Oprah found her long-lost half sister.  No news for the rest of week - all this football talk makes me want to hide out in a mall somewhere.  Judge Judy will have to suffice. 

One of the things I got to thinking about today as I was watching my feet bounce back and forth while I was doing my exercises was how the body functions.  It's such an amazing machine, isn't it?  I mean, think about it.  My leg bones were broken, and right away my body sent blood to clot the fracture, which gave way to fibroblasts to producing collagen, which led to chondroblasts,  Then, my body used the chondroblasts to create a hard shell called a bone callus.  After the bone callus is finished forming, osteoclasts and osteoblasts are going to spend months remodeling the bone by replacing the bone callus with harder compact bone.  Isn't that AMAZING?!? 

(Info taken from:

http://health.howstuffworks.com/human-body/systems/musculoskeletal/heal-broken-bones1.htm

Go there if you want to read exactly how bones heal.  It's cool stuff.)

The human body is one amazing thing.  James (the guy I talked about yesterday) talks about how the human body is dead without the spirit.  (I'm kind of freaked out by spiritual things, I'm not gonna lie.  The word "spirit" has taken some getting used to in the last several years as a Christian because it makes me wriggle.  I think that most people would say that every human being has some sort of "soul" or "spirit", something that connects us to a higher being, and to one another.  Right?    

It seemed to be a little out there for me, but once I actually started to experience the change in my life because I was doing things like praying, and trying to still my heart so that I could hear the voice of this Christ through things like reading the Bible and trying to remember what it said, I started to realize that there was so much more to me than just me.  So much more to my life than just living it for myself.  The Bible talks about how we become one with Christ when we commit our lives to him - he infiltrates every nook and cranny.  Our heart, our mind, our soul.  I started to learn about what it meant to worship him "in spirit and in truth".)

James says, "As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead." (2:26)

I think about how my body would be dead without my spirit - devoid of life, cold, and hard.  This verse isn't saying that in order to please God, or in order to get to heaven you have to do good deeds.  I think what it's saying is that you have to put your actions where your mouth is.  To say that I will live my life for Jesus is one thing, but to actually do it is another.  I always try to ask myself, whenever I feel stale & cold, "What am I doing to put my money where my mouth is?  What am I doing to truly embody the kind of life Jesus lived, and to actually do the things he told me to do in his stories & in his conversations?"  Because to embody the life of Jesus means to completely let go of self, to surrender all for his sake. 

It is an ongoing process that takes time - a lifetime actually.  

Kind of like the mending of bones.  Except that even though it feels like it's going to take a lifetime for my bones to mend, it will hopefully only take another handful of months.  So I guess it's not exactly the same, but it's a process.  Sort of like becoming like Jesus.  : )