I want to get fit. Not to get slender, but to get strong. I want big arms that pull my friends from the putrid fucking grasp of cops. I want to pull my friends. Pull them out of the plummeting batons and bikes, into my big old arms that wrap them up and kiss their foreheads and keep them warm.

I want bulky arms and legs to stand between the arms of power and god’s kindom.

I want to love my body, big and strong. I want to use it for healing, protection and connection. I want to use my body for worship.

One of the most healing things about my jesus god is that he was a body. My god has 10 dirty fingernails and an ass-crack. A funny body, a living body, a dying body.

A god-body.

It’s fucking hard to live in a body, and it’s fucking hard to live in my body. Growing up, I was chubby and shy, and had this wild frizzy hair that wouldn’t do anything anyone tried to get it to do. On top of that, I was a very devout and pious evangelical christian who would rebuke kids who said bad words at recess. Needless to say, making friends and fitting in was a challenge for me.

And a lot of that loneliness was held in my body. The triple threat of growing up fat, femme, and evangelical really has done a number on the way I look at myself. I was told, explicitly and implicitly, that my body was less valuable and desirable because it was fat. And that my job as a girl is to be pretty for others. But that, as a good christian girl I need to shield my prettiness from the lecherous gaze of men. But because I’m fat I’m not pretty.

It was very confusing and very tiring.

So I slouch. Hold in my stomach. Endure clothes that cut off my circulation. I pushed food around my plate so my parents thought I was eating.

And I know my god feels it. I can’t say my god knows what it’s like to be fat, but I know my god knows what it means to ache. I know my god knows what it’s like to hurt, to be shamed and mocked and carry that in the body. Christ’s suffering, god’s suffering, was particular to a body.

My god knows what it feels like when your face gets hot from embarrassment. My god knows sweaty palms.

My god knows how a heart can drop into a stomach.

Our jesus, the refugee. The adolescent growing up in an occupied Palestine. His body, tortured and killed by the state.

So when we love and honor bodies, we love and honor jesus, the god-body.

And when we use our bodies to protect other bodies from state oppression, that is an act of worship.

So we ask for jesus’ blessing of our bodies. May we cook for each other and clean for each other when we are aching. May we hold hands and ask for consent. May we give and receive healing touch that reminds us who we are. May we pull each other out of the batons way.

Our little fucked up god-bodies are the gospel. In the fullness of their ache and fallibility.