Being Human is Not a Sin

I want to talk about something that made me really sad. 

My friend and I were having a chat on Marco Polo and she was talking about her severe anxiety. She told me how she’s not in therapy and how she knows what she needs to do to fix it. Exercise. Eat well. Go to bed earlier. She talked about going to bed late as if it were a sin. Something rebellious she needed to give up in order to become more like God. 

Then tonight another woman talked about how she sometimes eats too much. How her favorite sin is gluttony. How the only time she can overcome this is through prayer and so much work on her part. 

See, here’s the thing. 

One thing I refuse to believe about God is that God wants us to repent for being human.  I do not believe that God thinks we need to REPENT when we stay up later than we meant to. I do not believe that food is a moral choice. I DO NOT BELIEVE THAT BEING ANXIOUS OR DEPRESSED IS SOMETHING WE SHOULD FIX BY PRAYING IT AWAY. 

When I listened to these dear women speaking, I wanted to hug their bodies until they could feel my hug in their very souls. I want them to feel and know what I feel and know: that God is love. 

Perhaps it’s the woman in me who has been through cognitive behavioral therapy, perhaps it is just my compassion for people who are suffering, maybe it is my hard-won, deeply therapized self-compassion, but I do not believe that things that are behaviorally human are necessarily sinful. And I believe that if we have behaviors that we want to change, we should view them as exactly what they are: behaviors. They are not moral failings and character flaws and things we need to tell God we are sorry about at the end of the day. They are behaviors. Behaviors that humans can change if we choose. But they are not inherently moral. They have nothing to do with how much we love other people. How kind and generous we are. 

And if I want to change a behavior, wouldn’t it be so much more compassionate if I went about it cognitively without the weight of moral judgment?? If I worked on it behaviorally without any judgment attached?  Wouldn’t it be easier if I gave myself permission to be human and permission to sometimes stay up too late and eat too much because THAT’S WHAT’S IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN? and then I could work on small changes to behavior that over time helped me with going to bed earlier?

And then if I wanted to pray for anything, it would be for God’s grace to descend on me as I try to be more kind and patient and loving and forgiving. Because of the world needs anything, it’s that.