When I began to lose my faith in God at fifteen, I lost my appetite, completely, for years, eating only because it seemed I should eat and never because my body had asked for it. A passage in Corinthians had been the compass for what to do with the spiritual liability of my flesh—the body is a temple … ye are not your own—and once I had slipped loose of the belief that the Bible was the word of God, I had no law, no rubric for what to do with myself. I had believed a body was nothing but an altar to the Lord, not my own, not anyone’s own, just something I was borrowing as the physical site of my devotion. I packed rigidly balanced sack lunches as a preteen and worried about artery plaque, and preached to a boy at school I’d heard was stealing his mom’s cigarettes. For ye are bought at a price, Paul told us, therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.

Without God, what was a body? Just a place to wait.