Ragan Sutterfield - This Is My Body: From Obesity to Ironman, My Journey into the True Meaning of Flesh, Spirit, and Deeper Faith

I honestly dont think there is a book out there like this one that is quite so brave and honest about the complex, pain-filled, and beautiful experience so many of us have with our bodies. I applaud Ragan Sutterfield for bringing to the light what has for so long been hiding in the dark.

N ADIA B OLZ -W EBER , author of Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and Saint

Ragan has learned from experience what our best poets have been telling usthe key to being human in our time is a recovered body. That the soft animal of your body will teach you, like the wild geese, if you give it your attention. What Ragan makes so beautifully clear is how Jesus longs to love and redeem us in and through our bodies. This Is My Body is a memoir that threatens to upend spiritual writing in the twenty-first century.

J ONATHAN W ILSON -H ARTGROVE , author of Strangers at My Door: A True Story of Finding Jesus in Unexpected Guests

Ragan Sutterfield not only reminds us that we live our faith in our bodies, but he calls us to live with beauty, grace, and strength. This is My Body is the ideal companion as we seek to live whole healed lives in mind, body, and spirit.

D OUG P AGITT , author of Flipped: The Provocative Truth That Changes Everything We Know About God

We are practicing for forever. Thats the last sentence of this remarkable book, in which Ironman meets the Jesus Prayer, and every preceding word leads up to it. At a time when so many memoirs seem to be driven by a terminal narcissism, Ragan Sutterfields story of transformation lifts us out of relentless self-preoccupation.

J OHN W ILSON , editor, Books & Culture

Ragan Sutterfield has intensely lived a struggle in pursuit of fulfillment. In This Is My Body, he rehearses this struggle in vivid and engrossing detail, from encroaching obesity to a broken marriage to completing marathons and a grueling triathlon. His story is unflinchingly honest and encouraging for all of us who want to be whole, body and soul.

R ODNEY C LAPP , author of Tortured Wonders: Christian Spirituality for People, Not Angels

T HIS I S M Y B ODY

P UBLISHED BY C ONVERGENT B OOKS

Scripture quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked ( NIV ) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica Inc.TM Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com.

Details in some anecdotes and stories have been changed to protect the identities of the persons involved.

Hardcover ISBN 978-1-60142-551-5
eBook ISBN 978-1-60142-553-9

Copyright 2015 by Ragan Sutterfield

Cover design by Kristopher K. Orr; cover image by Woods Wheatcroft, Corbis Images

Published in association with the literary agency of Wendy Sherman, Wendy Sherman Associates, Inc., 27 W. 24th St., Suite 700B, New York, NY 10010.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published in the United States by Convergent Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company.

C ONVERGENT B OOKS and its open book colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sutterfield, Ragan.
This is my body : from obesity to ironman, my journey into the true meaning of flesh, spirit, and deeper faith / Ragan Sutterfield.First Edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-60142-551-5ISBN 978-1-60142-553-9 (electronic) 1. Human body
Religious aspectsChristianity. 2. Sutterfield, Ragan. I. Title.
BT741.3.S88 2015
233.5dc23

2014035477

v3.1

For my wife, who loved my body from the start and showed me the way to wholeness.

Contents

Witness

Can I get a witness?

This common call of Spirit-filled pastors, so often parodied, is in fact a call to something good and true and necessary. As human beings we cant find truth on our own; we need the experiences of others to help us find our meaning. Those of us who have discovered something good in all the confusion of the world need to testify to the ways in which our lives have found their fullness. This book is my witness, my testimony, of how I finally experienced God not as some disembodied spirit in a faraway heaven, but in the very echo of my flesh.

We live in a time in which we are barraged with a multitude of messages about what our bodies should look like, what purposes they should serve, and what bearing they should have on our minds and spirits. As a result, most of us have assembled troubled images in our heads of what it means to have a good body. Weve been told that a good body is one that produces all the right numbers (blood pressure, cholesterol, body mass index) and has all the right dimensions, though definitions of whats right vary depending on whom you ask. Weve been sold a standard thats delivered via the grocery store magazine rack. A good body is sexy and it is lean, were told. It is never weak, disordered, diseased, or broken.

The cacophony of opinions about what our bodies should be is so loud, its hard to listen for the voices that matter. Many of us are tempted, as I was, to just forget it all and let our bodies give in to one addiction or another. Others of us strive to perfect our bodies, obsessing over every muscle curve and wrinkle of our skin. Ive done that too.

Dont be vain.

Dont be a glutton.

Its just a shell.

Religious teachers rarely help us through the mess. Their own messages represent a confusing range of contradictions. Few of them tell us that our bodies are good and glorious. The body for most is a burden, a weight that can drag us down toward a host of sins. A shell we will cast off when we can finally live as spirits in a faraway heaven.

I heard and lived all these messages, but God whispered to me another word. Through love and prayer and running long miles, I discovered something else about my body: it is a gift, a sign of Gods love in the world. Yours is too. Whatever your shape and whatever struggles youve had with your body, these facts are true right now, not at some point down the road when heavenly perfection will be achieved.

Can I get a witness? the preacher calls.

Here I go.

After midnight

Ouachita National Forest

Im just past the 26.2-mile marathon mark, and I still have another four and a half miles until the finish. Its around 1:30 a.m., and Ive been running for over five hours, up and down the gravel service roads of the Ouachita National Forest in western Arkansas. Theres no moon. The sky is overcast. I wish Id spent more time searching for my good headlamp because the spare I brought is going dim, making only one small circle of light in the darkness. They say that copperhead snakes like to spread out on these roads at night, seeking warmth for their cold blood from the sun-baked rocks and gravel.