This Temple is Sacred: Reclaiming the Spirit Within 04.20.2025
“If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you,
He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies
through His Spirit who dwells in you.”
—Romans 8:11
I felt it after a workout yesterday—heart pounding, lungs still catching up.
And then, like a holy ambush, emotion welled up in my chest.
Not exhaustion. Not pride.
But grief.
Grief for how I’ve treated my body.
Grief for how I’ve withheld gentleness.
Grief for how I’ve forgotten to love the temple that houses the Spirit of God.
Instead of swallowing it back, I surrendered.
Tears came.
And in that moment, I remembered:
This body is not a project.
It’s a dwelling place.
We speak so often of the Holy Spirit as if He’s somewhere far off—waiting to be called down, waiting to show up.
But He’s already here.
He dwells within.
And I’ve spent years walking past Him in the hallway of my own heart.
The book of Acts tells a different story—one of power, boldness, wonder.
They moved with the Spirit like breath in the lungs.
They didn’t just believe in the Spirit. They embodied Him.
Not out of striving, but surrender, at a cellular level.
Not to perform, but to partner.
But somewhere along the way, we spiritualized the Spirit into abstraction.
We boxed a living Presence into an idea—safe, contained, theoretical.
We domesticated what was meant to be wild.
Tamed what was meant to shake foundations.
We stopped expecting wonder.
Stopped welcoming holy interruption.
Stopped yielding to the mystery that lives in our very cells.
And when we forgot who lives in us,
we forgot how to treat the home He chose.
This temple—my body—is not an inconvenience.
It’s not just aging flesh.
It’s not a before-and-after story.
It’s a holy vessel.
But I haven’t always treated it that way.
There was a time when I pushed my body hard—two workouts a day, drenched in discipline and drive.
I felt strong, toned, dare I say even sexy.
And I’ve longed for that body to return—the one that made me feel in control.
The one that blurred into the expectations of the world.
The one that felt easy to love.
And in that longing, I’ve dismissed the miracle of the body I live in now—
A body that weathered childbirth.
That still nourishes life with softness and sustains it with tenderness.
A body marked by the work of love.
By deepening lines and slowly shifting curves.
By 35 years of experience etched into its skin.
I’ve tried to tighten it back up.
I’ve nourished it with wholesome food, oils, and natural balms, hoping to reverse time’s tender touch.
But they don’t take the aging away—the kind culture demands we deny.
And then—after a hard workout, heart pounding and breath catching—I unraveled.
I stood in front of the mirror, stripped of illusion.
No angles. No filters. Just me.
And I broke.
Tears poured down my face—not quiet ones,
but blubbering, shoulder-shaking sobs.
The kind that come from somewhere deep.
The kind that cleanse.
It wasn’t just emotional. It was psycho-somatic.
A full-bodied reckoning.
A mystical encounter dressed in muscle and sweat.
The Spirit, alive in my nervous system, finally being heard.
I had spent years as a quiet martyr to perfection—
Chasing symmetry, youth, tone, tightness—
As if holiness could be achieved through aesthetic.
As if I needed to deserve the Spirit that already chose to dwell in me.
But we were never meant to blend in with a world obsessed with performance and aesthetic.
The Kingdom has always marked us as strange—a peculiar people, set apart.
“Dear friends, I urge you as aliens and strangers in the world
to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul.”
—1 Peter 2:11
And perfectionism is one of those wars.
It wages silently.
It dresses itself up as virtue.
But it pulls us away from presence.
From peace.
But this wasn’t a breakdown.
It was a visitation.
The undoing of false altars.
A moment of incarnation where I finally remembered:
The Spirit doesn’t need my perfection.
He needs my presence.
I wasn’t crying because I hated my body.
I was crying because I realized how long I’d been withholding acceptance and love from her.
Because I saw her striving—always trying—to keep showing up for me.
And in that holy undoing, I surrendered.
I told her: I see you. I’m sorry. I love you.
I will still care for her.
I will still nourish, stretch, move, tend.
But no longer from the illusion that she is meant to be timeless—
Only from the truth that she is worthy. Now. As she is.
This is the new temple.
And she is still sacred.
Not in spite of her softness.
But because of it.
“Because I live, you also will live.”
—John 14:19
If you’re anything like me—bewildered that despite possessing the same Holy power that healed, that spoke in tongues, that resurrected—we rarely see the miraculous signs and wonders of that early church...
Maybe the first wonder isn’t outward.
Maybe it’s not fire from heaven or a dramatic healing.
Maybe it’s the quiet miracle of looking in the mirror and seeing what God sees.
Maybe it’s not casting out demons, but casting out shame.
Maybe it’s not raising the dead, but remembering we’ve already been raised with Christ.
Because resurrection is not only a historical event—
It’s a present reality.
A Spirit that dwells.
A life that flows.
A love that lifts us, again and again,
from the graves we dig within.
This is how the world is healed—
Not by spectacle, but by slow, holy surrender.
By a thousand micro-resurrections that ripple outward.
By loving the place where He chose to dwell.
So come, Holy Spirit.
Be alive in me again.
He is risen.
In love + light,
April
