First Corinthians 6 19 through 20.

Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the holy spirit who is in you whom you have received from

god you are not your own you are bought at a price therefore honor god with your bodies this is the word of the

lord amos my three-year-old spent a lot of his conscious life today watching me go through chemotherapy,

which included losing every hair on my head and on my face.

And so he will regularly say to me, Dad, I miss your small beard.

Can you bring back your small beard?

So at the beginning of this past summer,

in my bathroom one evening, Amos strolled in,

and I decided to delight him by shaving my face.

That was the inciting incident to a full-blown traumatic episode.

Kirsten came into the bathroom 20 seconds later with all three of my children watching me

screaming in terror. I hate seeing myself like this. I just completely lost it, drowning in an ocean

of unprocessed trauma from chemotherapy that ended almost a year prior. And in that moment,

that was, of course, just the tip of the iceberg.

Over the course of the months that followed, I began to uncover the truth, that I had built

a whole new set of habits around controlling my body, how it felt, and what was happening

to it.

The previous year of my life had been a profound loss of control.

I couldn't eat and I struggled to go to the bathroom.

I wasn't healthy or strong enough to coach my son's little league team or even to attend the games sometimes.

Often I couldn't preach or show up at the office.

...