How to be Healthy

Proverbs 3:7b-8..."depart from evil. It shall be health to thy navel, and marrow to thy bones."

In December, I was blessed to participate in the birth of our tenth grandchild,  a sweet little lady named Savannah Grace.   In this observance of birth, I was impressed again of how the "navel" is a central, life sustaining, very important part of birthing. Even continuing afterwards, it is a priority that it is kept clean and healthy. When I am attending a newborn,  I have respect for this part of that little body.

With that in mind, I considered Proverbs 3:8. The significant part of this comparison is that the navel is where life originated and it is the central location of the body.  Anything unhealthy that invades the body will affect survival and spread to very vital parts. 

How I seek daily for understanding from God how to be "healthy" in my body and soul.  I realize that a healthy soul seems much more important than the health of the body.  But by experience, I also see that when the body is hurting, I can have a more difficult time focusing on spiritual goals. 

When I was a good many years younger, I was painfully reminded by some serious health issues,  that my choice of food intake most definitely was affecting my physical body.  Forced to make some pretty drastic lifestyle changes, I can remember feeling quite deprived from some of the great pleasure that I received from eating "unhealthy" food! Looking back, I can see how I learned so much from those lessons.  Today, if I feel badly, I will retrace my thinking to what food I have been eating. It will start with a small trigger, but if my indulgences continue, it will quickly spread to all my body. It is amazing how a few food choices can result in making me feel really terrible.

Now, I have been faulted for comparing food to evil, but I think, in all honesty, most everyone knows that we are killing ourselves by our unhealthy food choices.  If that is fact ( and medical science has proven it so), it quickly becomes a spiritual problem. This is an area that I often choose not to address because I think it is not a moral infraction to indulge in food. Thus, I don't enlist grace and enlightenment about this part of my life.  Unhealthy food is my besetting weakness and I have found I often have to pray for awareness in how to eat and sometimes have to repent for failure.  It has become so important to me, that it is very often a daily prayer right alongside the prayer for God to deliver me from all other temptations.

Just as the navel is respected at time of birth, so this body  should be protected from things that negatively affect it. I believe the Lord will honor anyone who will seek Him in this quest to respect the body. He will be pleased with anyone that chooses to obey the commandment to let the body be His Temple.

I want to say that living and eating healthy is not a religion.  I am not a "health nut". I just believe that this is Bible based instruction that will reap rewards and bless,  just as surrender in any other area of my life is rewarded.

My prayers become very intense every time God reminds I am His child. He has a right to initiate change or control in any area of my life. I really want to have the central part of my being balanced out emotionally, physically, and spiritually.