J. Nicole Morgan - Fat and Faithful: Learning to Love Our Bodies, Our Neighbors, and Ourselves

To Everett, Mia, Natalie, and Brielle.
May you live a life of vibrant, enormous love in a world that so often tells us to shrink.
It is my great joy to be your aunt.

My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.

Psalm 139:15 (NIV)

The curves of your hips are like jewels,
The work of the hands of an artist.

Song of Songs 7:1 (NASB)

• 9. The Church That Eats
  Together Stays Together
• Epilogue: A Prayer of Blessing for Fat Rolls
  and Thunder Thighs

I grew up fat and loving Jesus. As one of those kids who was patient and optimistic by nature, I found that faith came easily to me. I dont remember a time when I didnt know about God and feel a love for God. My mother tells me that when I was three years old, I stopped midstride as I was walking out of the living room and nonchalantly announced that I was going to be a missionary when I grew up. As I got older, I genuinely enjoyed living my faith in all the usual ways: church attendance, prayer, Bible reading.

Yet I was frequently distracted and burdened by what I saw as my biggest spiritual and personal flaw: my weight. I was fat. I am fat. That has never changed. I now see the image of God reflected in my body, marveling at the way my size reveals parts of the heart and character of Godcontributing to the full body of Christ that is the church. That was not always the case.

I used to flip through my baby book as a young teenager, scrutinizing the pictures to see when I became fat. I do not remember ever not being fat, but surely it started somewhere. Around four is when the double chin started to show. In one picture around that age, I stood next to my brothers at Disney Worldgrinning wildly at the joy of it all, my round belly prominent under my shirt that was raised just a bit above my waist. By third grade, there was no question: I was fat. That was the year I found my school picture ripped in half on the floor of the school bus as I exited one afternoon. The only person on the bus who wouldve had it was my best friend, who lived a few doors down. I picked up the pieces of the picturemy chubby face and unfortunate bangs on one half, my bare arms and the top of my gray dress that I thought looked so grown-up on the other. Thats the first time I remember thinking there must have been something wrong with how I looked; why else would my image be ripped in half by someone who was my friend? I remained friends with the girl who I was sure had ripped up my photo until she moved away in middle school. I never told her about finding the picture.

Once, when I had been absent from school for a few days, I returned to my classmates joking that they thought maybe I couldnt fit through the door anymore. Another time, someone called me fat as I walked down the school hallway, and my friend, the one who had torn my picture up, turned around and responded with a fierce protectiveness. At home, I was not chastised for my weight. My mother did at times lament her own figure and would occasionally tell me she wanted better for me.

From an early age, I heard fatness mentioned as a sin from the pulpit. I eventually grew to hate my body and believed with passionate conviction that not only was my body wrong and ugly, it was ungodly. I fully believed that my body was shameful and an embarrassment to God. I believed that I had wasted the gift of my body, my temple, and could offer nothing of worth. I believed that everything I had was tainted and unusable because it all came from a body that was fat and therefore sinful.

At the age of fifteen, I wrote in my diary that I wanted to lose one hundred pounds in the next year. I wrote out my prayer: God, I will try my best to lose weight, because my body is your temple and deserves to be treated with care. Please God help me to resist temptations, and if its your will to meet my goal. The next year I wrote, I am not where God wants me. I am not in His best will for me. Mainly because I abuse his templemy body. It is supposed to be a holy and righteous act of worship to him, and it is not. It is a temple of worship to food and gluttony. SIN. I say I love God and would do anything for him, but do I really?

I wrote my plans in my journal. Diets, exercise, accountability, prayers, Scripture memorization no matter what I did or what I tried, I couldnt become thin. I was convinced that my weight was a walking billboard telling the world that I didnt really love God. I reasoned that if I loved God, if I believed in Jesus, then I would have the Holy Spirit, and by extension the fruit of the spirit. I would have love, joy, peace, patience, and self-control. And if my wide hips said anything, they shouted that I lacked self-control. Everyone knew that if you just ate less and moved more, you would be thin. But all I could tell myself when I looked in the mirror as a teenager was that I clearly loved something else more than God. Even worse, I feared that I would give God a bad name. I didnt think I could tell anyone that God can change things and make all things new when God couldnt even transform me.

After I graduated high school, I decided to spend my entire summer helping a church in a small mountain town in the Appalachian hills of West Virginia. I worked alongside six other high-school- and college-age interns and the two pastors at the local church. We organized food and clothing giveaways, ran day camps for kids, cleaned up the church to make the space functional, and loved and served the local community who called the Appalachian town home.

The Sunday before I left, I sat on the pew of my home church, next to the other girl who would be serving with me, and I was overwhelmed with guilt. I could not imagine why God would allow me the opportunity to serve in such a visible way when I had failed to discipline my body into thinness. I grabbed the hand of my friend and asked her to pray with me at the altar. She didagreeing with me that God is good to use us despite our flaws. We praised Gods mercy at using those of us like me whose sin hangs in swaying drapes off the back of our arms for all the world to see. As we knelt at the altar, hot tears fell silently down my cheeks. I was so ashamed that I was heading into a summer of working for a church in a fat body. I was so ashamed that I was supposed to spend my summer telling people about the power of God and the importance of serving God while my very presence would be a hindrance to that message. God could not narrow my waist, but I was about to spend a summer telling people that God could transform the world. I believed I had no credibility to tell people to surrender their life when every jiggle of my arm sent out a signal that my life was ruled by laziness and gluttony.