There is a story we have been told about the body.

Somewhere between the sermons and the prayers, between the kneeling and the standing, between the hush of sanctuary and the urgency of altar calls, it seeped in like rain through the cracks. It wasn’t always spoken outright, but it was there, humming beneath the surface.

The body is flesh.
And flesh is something to deny.

I did not grow up in a world that whispered these things to me, not in childhood, not in the earliest years of my becoming. But when faith found me, when it wrapped itself around my bones and asked me to step into something larger than myself, I started hearing it.

Be anxious for nothing.
Trust God.

And I did.

I trusted with everything I had. I took deep breaths and whispered prayers and willed my faith to be strong enough, still enough, holy enough to quiet the hum beneath my ribs. But what happens when trust is not the issue? When belief is not in question, but the body still pulses with fear?

What happens when the breath is shallow and the chest tightens and the body—this beautiful, wild thing that carries me through the world—does not know how to be still?

The Language No One Taught Me

The story of the body within faith was never big enough for me. It had space for surrender but not for sensation. It made room for discipline but not for delight. It spoke of peace but never gave me the steps to find it when my hands shook and my pulse quickened and I could not seem to land inside my own skin.

So I did what many do. I learned to live outside of myself.

I became very good at being somewhere else—somewhere in the past, somewhere in the future, somewhere other than here. I knew how to pray, how to recite, how to call on the Lord with all my heart, but I did not know how to be present in my own body.

And then, by grace or exhaustion, or the slow and patient work of God, I found something new.

I found the breath I had not been paying attention to.
I found the tension in my shoulders, the ache in my jaw.
I found my feet against the earth, the steady weight of my body being held.

And I did not run from it.

I learned that the body is not an obstacle to faith but an avenue into it. That God was not waiting for me outside of my skin, but speaking within it—through sensation, through breath, through the steady rise and fall of my chest.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote, We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human one.

I had spent so long tending to the spirit that I had forgotten the body was part of the story too.

A Faith That Takes Up Space

The body is not something to escape. It is how we taste, touch, weep, and rejoice. It is how we kneel in prayer, how we sing, how we stand in the presence of the holy and tremble.

And yet, we have been told that trust is a thing of the mind. That belief is something to be held tightly in our thoughts. But the body knows. It remembers what the mind forgets. It holds the stories we have not yet learned to speak.

And what if—what if—faith was always meant to be lived not just in words, not just in ideas, but in the way we breathe and move and inhabit the sacred ground of our own skin?

What if the peace of God is not something we reach for but something we return to?

What if faith is not just something we think, but something we embody?

Because I am learning, slowly and imperfectly, that trust is not just a thought to hold but a posture to step into. That presence is not an idea but a practice. That the body is not something to overcome but something to bring fully into the presence of the Divine.

And this changes everything.

If this resonates, tell me—what is your body speaking to you today?