Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes, Concluding Part

Just want to say THANKS for your comments, insights, and general support of our little Love Your Body week!

I had planned to do other posts...like an idea share about fitting exercise into a busy life or maybe a healthy recipe exchange. (If you'd like to share suggestions on those subjects, please do!! We're all trying to be health conscious, right?!) But I couldn't bring myself to interrupt the comment thread on that last post. Loved the things you had to say. Seems like this is a big issue. For everyone.

And isn't it at least nice to know we're not fighting the battle alone?
So good luck to all of us in our perspective-changing efforts!

I'll wrap up the discussion with a memory.

I was a twenty year old college student living in a crummy apartment with three dear, dear roommates and my parents' first color TV (rabbit ears? you better believe it).

My Friday mornings were class free so I developed the delightful tradition of curling up on the couch to watch the 11:00am BYU devotional re-runs. Great, great stuff, I tell you...
Dallin H. Oaks sporting a little more hair and an endless stream of smart humor.
The Hollands as President and First Lady of the Y (need I say more?).
An aging Marion G. Romney delivering feeble-voiced but powerful addresses, the lights of the Marriott Center reflecting bizarre colors across his glasses the whole time.
Marvin J. Ashton, who died when I was six, but who my heart knows and loves because of those old BYU devotionals.

It was on one of those Friday mornings in front of that tiny TV that I heard Elder Nelson's 1987 address The Magnificence of Man.

Magnificent = "Greatly Made."

In his speech, Elder Nelson described various organs and the miraculous work they do on a daily basis. Among other things, he hailed the heart, his organ of expertise, for its unequaled endurance: "The work it performs daily is equivalent to carrying a 150-pound man to the top of the Empire State Building, consuming only about four watts of energy-less than that used by a small light bulb in your home." !!

He talked about the body's various systems of self-preservation. Think of the number of organs that are "paired" (eyes, ears, lungs, kidneys), or the way major organs (like the brain, heart, and liver) are nourished by two routes of circulation, or the way the body is equipped with, or can create of necessity, "collateral pathways" (like breathing through the mouth when sinuses are congested. I always complain about a dry mouth and throat when my nose is stuffy, but I'm going to have to start saying, "Thanks, Heavenly Father, for preserving my life by providing me with a back-up way to breathe.")

Elder Nelson also discussed self-defense, self-repair ("To my thinking," he said, "this process of self-renewal prefigures the resurrection." Fascinating?! Fascinating.), auto-regulation, and adaptation. Then, toward the end of his address, he countered several popular creation theories (ex nihilo, evolution, big bang) with these words,

"To me, such theories are unbelievable! Could an explosion in a printing shop produce a dictionary?...Even if that could happen, such a dictionary could certainly not heal its own torn pages, or renew its own worn corners, or reproduce its own subsequent editions! We are children of God, created by him and formed in his image."

I believe that.

Old and young....

Big and small.

We are all magnificent!