YouTube: I’m Here By Choice
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?”
Matthew 6:25
I have always found it interesting that I can read a passage like this countless times only to read it again and discover a new layer of meaning. This time, one line jumped out: the body is more than clothing. Thinking of the soul and our desire to make sense of our earthly experience, I always considered the body and clothing as two aspects of the same problem—that sometimes cumbersome external aspect of our being. Yet Jesus makes a point to distinguish the two, saying the body is more important than clothing. The imagery that suddenly flashed through my mind came in an unexpected form.
Imagine flying into a city and renting a car. Why would you rent a car? You may have business to conduct, family and friends you wish to visit, sightseeing you want to do, or all the above. The car enables you to do these things. Yes, it requires fuel, and it needs to be in good working condition. These needs, however, are secondary to your reason for renting it. You don’t want to spend your time thinking about the needs of the car. You have more important things to do.
Think of your body as a rental car and your earth-life as the city you flew into. You rented this car for a reason, probably many reasons. Yes, this rental car needs fuel, and it requires care. But I think Jesus was urging his audience to put things in perspective. The fact that you have a body indicates you had a reason for renting it.
If you worked at the airport’s car rental agency, you would see that people rent cars for a wide variety of reasons. There is no cosmic mandate that says a car must be rented only for business, for example. There is no required, universal purpose for renting. Every person shows up at the rental counter by choice, and for reasons of their own.
We may have taken on a body simply because we wanted to experience the full spectrum of the human venture, from infancy to old age. Perhaps this experience was cut short in a previous incarnation. Or, maybe there was an earthly career we wanted to pursue and the only way we could get to it was to rent this vehicle. It is possible that other souls we adored took the plunge and we followed just so we could share the experience with them.
The most freeing aspect of this is that my having a body means that I’m here by choice. Now, where is it that I would like to go today?