First, Let's Reform Ourselves

(Note: The first draft of this piece appeared in my blog on September 3, 2009. It seemed timely to take another look at it now in light of the passage and signing of the Health Care Reform Bill.)
What Did Jesus Do?

Jesus Obeyed

Do you not know that you are God’s temple, and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple…Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.
1Corinthians 3.16-17; 6.19-20

Jesus clearly understood what Paul would later write to the Corinthians about, that the body is a temple of God. Of course, Christ’s opponents completely misunderstood the Lord when he spoke of destroying the temple of his body, and in three days it would be resurrected. The Jerusalem Council thought Jesus was speaking about the building Herod had spent forty-six constructing. (See John 2.18-22) While we don’t have details about the Lord’s lifestyle, it is clear from the Gospels that he spent a lot of time outdoors, practiced fasting (Sometimes to the extreme!), and walked everywhere he went (With the exception of his entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday). The fact that Jesus endured a scourging so severe and survived long enough to die on the cross suggests remarkable fitness and strength. All the evidence points to Jesus being obedient in taking good care of his body, which he knew was God’s temple.

Now, we have all heard plenty in the last year, and been all but buried in news this week, about reforming health care in the United States. The issue has been solely focused on the reform of health care delivery. Unfortunately, the real problem is not the deliver of health care to Americans, it is the great demand for care by all of us unhealthy Americans, who largely have ourselves to blame for our poor health and lack of fitness. In short, most of us have been doing a very poor job obeying God and caring for the temple he has given each of us. All the attempts to reform health care delivery will ultimately end up in billions more being spent treating sick and injured Americans. It would be much cheaper, and incredibly more efficacious, if every American made a commitment to taking better care of ourselves. It’s not the system that needs to be reformed, it’s us! I won't insult your intelligence by pretending to have sufficient insight into the nation's health care delivery system to offer my suggestions on fixing it. But the best and most cost efficient way to deal with illness and injury is to do all you can to avoid them in the first place! This means that the real critical need is to reform Americans first, then to worry about reforming our health care systems.

Americans' increasing life-spans belie the fact of America's growing lack of fitness. Super-sized portions of fast-food combined with sedentary life-styles adds up to a lot of needless illness that costs everyone too much to treat. Any medical person will tell you that primary prevention is by far the "best medicine." But every day millions of Americans do, not to put too fine a point on it, dumb things that invite all manner of acute and chronic illnesses and injuries.

Here's one example that we all see pretty much every day: the driver in the vehicle in the lane next to us with a cigarette in one hand, a cell phone in the other, and the steering wheel in...well it's being juggled. An accident waiting to happen, chronic, and likely terminal illness, being sown in the lungs and heart! Like I said, dumb.
Then there's the parade of young school-children coming in to my wife's school nurse offices on a daily schedule because of their asthma and diabetes. Hmm, the fact that as infants and toddlers these kids were a few feet, often literally inches, from a constant stream of tobacco smoke couldn't have something to do with their asthma, could it? The poor diet, obesity, and all but total lack of exercise don't contribute to the diabetes, does it? Multiply what my wife sees each week by all the school nurse offices across the county and, well, as I said, the problem we need to fix is health care demand more than health care delivery. It's our brokenness that should be more of a concern to the nation than the health care industry.

I don't mean to pick on my wife, and I don't need to. Working at a Scout camp last summer I saw plenty of boys, one-fifth my age, whom I could run circles around. And I'm not the most active guy on the block. But when I can take a pretty easy 5-mile hike and leave a bunch of 11-12 year-olds in the dust, something’s wrong, and reforming health care delivery won't fix it. And it's not just the boys in Scouting who are out of shape. Scout leaders like to say, "Scouting rounds a boy out." Well, judging by the belt-lines of no few leaders, Scouting rounds adults out a bit too much! And it was, to put it plainly, revolting, to visit the leaders' arbor and choke on all the cigarette smoke there; so much for a Scout's promise to keep himself, "physically strong." If they keep on smoking those leaders won’t be physically strong, they’ll be physical wrecks, and it didn't do me any good to be around their "exhaust."

All this is not to say that health care delivery couldn't and shouldn't be improved. But I, for one, would much prefer all the concern to be directed where it could do the most immediate good. If we all improved our health, health care would be a lot less on our minds. From the perspective of faith, believing what St. Paul said about our bodies being God's temple (1Corinthians 3.16-17; 6.19-20), tells me that all the abuse and neglect of Americans' bodies is an affront to God, and an outright act of disobedience. Not that Congress will ever concern itself with honoring God as an incentive to encourage Americans to reform our lives, rather than waiting for our leaders to reform a system that isn't the real problem.

Again, the real need is not to reform the system of health care delivery, but rather to reform ourselves and so reduce the demand for health care, and start glorifying God in our body. America, let’s start taking better care of God’s temple. That’s what Jesus did!

S.D.G.

Jim
www.jimwilkenministries.org
Marion, NC
PS 37.4