How much time do you spend taking care of your body? Y’all, shaving these legs is a time suck. This hair has to be washed every other day. Eyelashes don’t just glue themselves on. It’s all an investment of time. Time to exercise. Time to cook healthy meals. Time to rest. If you don’t take the time required for care, your body will suffer. You can’t just skip washing your hair for a week. You will unintentionally grow dreads, and not the cute kind with colors and knick knacks. You don’t want to be the girl with furry armpits just because you couldn’t make time to shave while you were in the shower.
How much time do you spend taking care of your house? On my to-do list is a perpetual daily chore: Clean. It’s amazing how it’s just my husband and I in our little beach house, yet the dishes pile up so quickly. Every day there is cleaning to do, and if I skip a day it gets real messy real quick. I figured out a trigger to me becoming grouchy is a messy house. It’s physically impossible for me to be giddy if my house looks like a ghetto inside. Some of y’all are wondering why you wake up grouchy … maybe it’s because your house be looking ghetto. Clean your space and you might just find a better attitude. Cleaning requires time. They have yet to successfully build that self-cleaning house, or even family that clean up after them selves. Until then, time is required of you.
With all these time sucks of taking care of your body, taking care of your house, taking care of your work, taking care of your kids, taking care of your dog, there’s just not much time left. And there’s one unseen thing that often goes without the investment of our time. One thing that suffers greatly because it’s out of sight and out of mind, and not given the time it needs.
Your soul.
It’s easy to treat ourselves as if we are a body with a little bitty bonus of a soul. We take care of our body first and our soul last. We’ll drink shakes, take pills, and buy all sorts of contraptions to make our bodies look and feel better. We’ll join the gym, create a workout routine, hire a trainer, go to a doctor, and download 7 apps on our phone all for our body. But what does our soul get?
You are not a body with a soul. You are a soul first and foremost, and your soul gets the bonus of a body to carry you through this portion of your life.
Read the book of Psalms and you’ll get a better understanding of the value of your soul. David writes more about his soul than his body. He talks to his soul. He encourages his soul. He writes of his soul being thirsty, his soul being hungry, his soul needing rest, his soul being worried, afraid, overwhelmed, grieving, even suffering. Have you ever described a deep ache within you as your heart hurting? Yeah, that is your soul grieving. Have you ever felt a void within, like a itch you don’t know how to scratch with an unfulfilled longing inside? Yeah, that is your hungry soul. You’ve sang about those hungry eyes, but girl, what about your hungry soul?
Your soul needs time just like your body and your house require time. But it’s so easy to ignore the needs of your soul and turn to tik tok for the next magic diet or exercise or cleaning hack. Girl, what about your soul care?
Peter puts it into perspective when he refers to his body as a tent. 2 Peter 1: 14, “I know that I will soon lay aside my tent.”
His body was not his end all be all. This earthly time walking around in this bodily tent is just a small portion of his lifetime. It’s all temporary. Temporary things cannot become our primary focus. Temporary things cannot get priority over eternal things.
What is eternal about you is your soul. You will never not exist. Since God created you, creation will never again be without you. You – the real you – your soul. Your body, well that tent you will soon lay aside after it has served its purpose. But your soul continues. The question is, how will you care for the part of you that matters most?
I made a list of 6 ideas for Soul Care. I’m sure you can guess several of them.
- Scripture.
- Prayer.
- Worship.
See, you knew those, didn’t you? But how about 3 more ways to take care of your soul.
- Fellowship.
That’s an old word my grandma used for church potlucks. It’s not appealing to me. Sounds kind of boring. But let me put it in a way you can get excited about. This is spending time with people who love Jesus like you do, and having fun together. I figured out that’s what makes our BIG Life Retreats so special. We’re all just girls who love Jesus, and we come together for fun adventures, and it feeds our soul! Our soul literally needs this time together. I crave it … and you do too. - Service.
Helping someone else is the fastest way to exit your own pity party. God designed us with a special release of dopamine within our brains each time we serve someone. Dopamine is a chemical messenger in the brain that makes us feel good. It gives us what is known as the “helper’s high”. Your soul literally feels good when you serve. My friend, that is soul care! Do something for someone who can do absolutely nothing in return for you. - Silence.
This is one is personal kryptonite. You know how Superman was crazy strong with all his flying and car throwing abilities, but there was one thing that would bring out his weakness, kryptonite. My krptonite is silence and I spend my days avoiding it. As a professional speaker, it’s the one thing you don’t do. You don’t stall out with nothing to say. When the speaker stops speaking, that’s awkward, so I make my life very busy and loud. However, in a busy and loud, rushed life, our soul is suffering. My soul needs silence. Your soul needs silence.
I learned a practice several years ago from my friend Theresa that is so simple and so powerful. You take two chairs and sit them together. You leave one empty for Jesus, and you sit in the other one. Then, you just sit there. Spend time with Jesus in your two chairs. Now notice I said I “learned this practice”, not that I often practice this practice. Quite honestly, I would rather go run a few miles than just sit in silence. I would rather deep clean my entire house than sit in silence. I would rather drive all the way to Miami in insane traffic and go grocery shopping than sit in silence.
You know what happens to me in silence? I have an almost irresistible urge to pick up my phone. Does that happen to you too? And if I don’t distract myself with my phone, here’s what happens when I sit in silence … I conk the heck out. I’ll just fall asleep, so it all seems kind of pointless. All while my soul is suffering. My soul is hungry. My soul is thirsty. My soul needs quiet time with Jesus.
So, if you struggle with silence like I do, here’s a very practical solution that we can each do. First, leave your phone behind. Then, grab 2 chairs. Invite Jesus to sit in one and you sit in the other one. Then pray this prayer, “Jesus, you can see the deepest parts of my being. What does my soul need?” Then just sit there. You don’t have to think. You don’t have to talk. Just be silent. If you doze off and take a little nap, then maybe that’s what your soul needed. If your mind wanders to the things that worry you, maybe that’s what your soul needed. Maybe you needed to bring those worries to Jesus’ chair.
Jesus fills any space he’s invited into. He will fill that empty chair and he will fill your soul.
Declare yourself a SOUL CARE TIME in your schedule. Just as you would declare time to take care of your body, or time to take care of your house, or time to care for your dog, your soul deserves intentional time. Everything else is temporary. This bodily tent you walk around in will be laid aside. This house you live in will one day crumble. Your job won’t matter, they will replace you as soon as you’re gone. But this soul of yours … it is eternal. It is forever. It is of true value.
Girl, take care of your soul. It needs something today. Jesus, what does my soul need?
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