I look both ways into traffic several times—and still feel like I’m leaping off a cliff every time I cross a street or pull my car out onto the road.
Furthermore, I’m now viscerally aware of a truth of which I previously had mere head knowledge: Our lives truly are in the hands of the Lord. In the blink of an eye, a fraction of a second, or the changing of a traffic light, everything can change.
Yet, to dwell on this truth would be paralyzing. It would be easy for the spirit to be overcome by the reality of just how fragile the body is.
Our Bodies Need the Body of Christ
This is why our physical bodies need the body of Christ.
God himself chose this metaphor-that-is-more-than-a-metaphor of “the body” to describe his people. It is his people whose flesh houses his Holy Spirit and carries out his mission with hands, feet, eyes, ears and tongues to touch, feed, shelter, listen and speak the good news. The church ministers to us not only in delivering songs and sermons for the mind and spirit. The church ministers to us physically, too. This ministry to the body requires, of course, bodily presence. But it requires more, too.
According to The Body Keeps the Score, human relationships are always the context in which healing from trauma occurs.
The critical issue is reciprocity: being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else’s mind and heart. For our physiology to calm down, heal and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety.
Yet, the church today is not always hospitable to those who have been traumatized. By absorbing the programmatic, formulaic, results-oriented ethos of the surrounding culture, the church can sometimes, if inadvertently, squeeze out the space, time and comforts needed by the traumatized. Indeed, even our emphasis on a moment of salvation that occurs on a distinct hour of a certain day of a particular month in a definite year can, even if only implicitly, contradict the processes of healing that are slow and serpentine, not so easily recorded in a date book.
The young man who shies away from shaking hands during meet-and greet might be recovering from abuse that makes him feel anxious and unsafe. The woman who shows up at church just a few times a year might be bearing the burden of false guilt because of things that happened to her at home when she was a little girl. And in my own case, as trivial as it sounds, if my church didn’t have comfortable seats, my experience of worship would have been entirely different, if I were able to attend at all.
Many biblical resources exist to help churches wisely minister to the traumatized. But perhaps the foremost model is offered by the good Samaritan who, upon encountering one who was suffering, had compassion, rescued him from his immediate distress, and made sure his future needs were met.
Because human beings are both bodies and souls, our brokenness will always manifest itself both physically and spiritually. Thus the body of Christ must minister in both ways for healing to occur.
What is true of the physical body has implications for the church body as well. Just as we receive cues from our physical bodies, we also respond viscerally to the messages—intended or not—sent by the body of Christ. Just as the traumatized must listen to what their bodies tell them, so too the members of the body of Christ must listen to one another, to each part—hand, foot and toe—whether healthy or broken.
And all who listen to the Lord will find healing to the flesh and refreshment for the bones (Prov. 3:8), and will eventually find themselves “at ease, without dread of disaster” (Prov. 1:33).
This article originally appeared here.
