Your body keeps the score, for now
Often times there is disconnect between what the church preaches and what psychology fields understand. I believe it is the great responsibility of the believers to recognize that those truths also teach us significant lessons about the God that created them.
Most individuals who have sought to better understand trauma have encountered the book “The Body Keeps the Score”. The explanations of how trauma reconfigures your physical body are extremely significant. For trauma victims, it is not simply a matter of will. The Bible certainly holds profound truths and the ultimate power of healing, but to minimize or dismiss the realities that trauma rewires our brains and requires intentional rewiring is foolish.
Today I was reflecting on the hope that we as Christians have that these are not our final bodies. In my reflection, it hit me that this includes new bodies that are free from trauma. Many sexual assault victims cling to the excitement of our cells being replaced every 7 years. How much sweeter and freer is the power of knowing that one day our whole body will be replaced?
There is a day coming, where as children of God we will live in bodies that have never been touched by abuse. There will be a day where the pain that your body holds onto will be fully wiped clean. Your trauma will lose even that power over you.
God did not design our bodies by accident.
The fact that our brain synapses and chemicals react the way that they do and get reprogramed is not a mistake he forgot to check for on a trial run. We aren’t a rough draft or a prototype. I believe that part of this design is because the horrors of sin are never what God created us for.
If sin was not in the world there would be no murder.
If sin was not in the world there would be no rape.
If sin was not in the world there would be no abuse.
God is not to blame for our choices to reject Him and choose sin. While we have certainly not all committed some of the atrocities that I have mentioned, we are all wicked and depraved. That is the reason that we all need salvation, not just the particularly “bad.”
If God created us as image-bearers then His design was for us to be treated as He is. But again, because of sin we do not even (especially) treat Him with the reverence and honor He deserves. If God incarnate was so horrifically mistreated, how can we expect to not experience similar brokenness in our own stories?
In saying this I am not attempting to minimize or condone abuse or trauma. I rest confidently in the assuredness that those individuals will stand accountable to God one day. If they have not repented and found His redemption, His wrath will not be withheld.
What I am attempting to say is that we cannot realistically expect a world that is not full of horrors while we are living in one that continually denies and rejects its Savior. We need to recognize this before we can also understand then the comfort that awaits us in heaven.
One day I will live in a body that has never had to experience some of the things this one has.
It will not know the pain and battles surrounding eating.
It will not know the lies that have been deeply burned into my brain and need to daily be taken to the Lord for Him to dispel.
It will not know some of the horrors that only those closest to me know I have experienced.
I will live in a body that is whole.
I will live in a body that has never been touched by sin.
I will live in a body free from trauma.
God is not absent from the spaces that feel too complex for Him to heal. He does not shy away from the realities of what our sin does to ourselves and others. He is merciful in how He chooses to allow us to know Him better through even the most broken circumstances. “You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.” Jeremiah 29:13. When we run to Him, there is nothing that can keep us from His love.
