I want to talk about the question I hear more than any other.
Nobody asks it out loud. It shows up sideways, usually as an apology. Someone tells me about the morning routine they want to start, or the hour they want to take back for their health, and then they lower their voice and say, “but it feels selfish.”
I know that voice. For most of my adult life it was mine.
I treated my body like a rental car. Something to drive hard and hand back. And I had reasons that sounded like virtue. My family needed me. Work needed me. Church needed me. Taking an hour for my own health felt like stealing that hour from someone I loved.
Then I spent enough time in hospital rooms to do the math differently. Five times I should have died. And from a hospital bed you can see something you cannot see from a busy calendar: the people I was refusing to “steal” from were the ones sitting in the waiting room.
Neglecting the body is not humility. It just moves the bill.
Here is where the faith and the science say the same thing. I love it when that happens.
Scripture first. Romans 12 calls offering your body a living sacrifice, and it calls that worship. Paul told the Corinthians that the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. Notice what that means. When the Bible uses temple language, it is talking about your body. Not a building. Not a program. You. Care of the body was never framed as indulgence. It was framed as stewardship of something that does not belong to you.
Now the science. In the 1970s a Harvard cardiologist named Herbert Benson studied what happens when a person practices simple, deliberate rest. Slow breathing. Quiet attention. The kind of stillness prayer has always required. He documented what he called the relaxation response: measurable shifts in heart rate, breathing, and the body’s stress chemistry.
I want to be careful here, because this is where people overreach. Benson’s work does not prove any theology. Studies on gratitude and contemplative practice are mixed, and the results depend on who was studied and how. What the research shows is more modest, and more useful: rest, attention, and gratitude are not decorative extras. They are real inputs, and the body registers them when they show up consistently.
So the oldest instruction and the newest instruments point the same direction. The things faith has always asked of us, rest, gratitude, stillness, community, turn out to be things a body can measure.
Which brings me back to the question. Is it selfish?
Here is the reframe that changed my life. If the body is a temple, then tending it is not vanity. It is obedience. When you take care of your body so you are strong enough to serve the people God put in front of you, self-care stops being indulgence and becomes faithfulness. You are not taking that hour from your family. You are making sure there are more hours.
One thing to do this week.
Tonight, before bed, sit down with both feet on the floor. Five minutes. Breathe in through your nose and let each exhale run a little longer than the inhale. While you breathe, name three things from today you are grateful for. Out loud is better. That is the whole assignment. It costs nothing, and Benson would tell you your body is listening. Do it every night this week and pay attention to how you sleep.
That is the practice. Small, free, and older than every gadget in your drawer.
One more thing. I have been building something around these ideas for the better part of a year, and it is almost ready. More on that soon.
Rak Chazak,
Rob
