I recently read about the ongoing saga between former Miss California, Carrie Prejean, and the Miss California Board of Directors.  Now Carrie is suing the organization because they publicly disclosed the fact that they loaned her $5,000 to pay for a breast augmentation surgery leading up to the Miss USA pageant, in hopes this would help her chances of winning.  Now I am a fan of Carrie and the courage she displayed, and there is no doubt that she was railroaded out of her Miss California title solely because of her opposition to same sex marriage.  But this latest revelation about her saddened me. 

As I read the story, I realized again that we have a culture that is so into 'body worship' that even our most confident and attractive young ladies buy into this lie and feel the need to surgically enhance their bodies in order to attract more attention, not to themselves as humans, but only to their bodies.  Wasn't there a time long ago and far away when it was considered rude and immoral for a bunch of men to focus their attention on the breasts of a young woman?  Yet now we live in a culture where plastic surgeons make megamillions each year enhancing womens' (often in their teens) breasts for this very purpose?  Am I the only one that thinks this is a little whacked???

And guys are not immune to this cult of body worship either.  We don't get botox injections and surgical enhancements quite as often, but we do take black market steroids in order to bulk up as quickly as possible.  And again, it is our best male athletes, not our worst, who continually buy into this lie and feel the pressure to go beyond what is natural. 

The source of this chaos is theological, not physical.  Once God is dethroned in a culture, all anyone has left is his or her physical body, so our body very naturally becomes our god.  You see, our hearts were made to worship, they were made to enthrone someone or something, so if God is not in the picture and the body is all that is left, we will definitely place it on the throne and pay any amount to 'enhance', 'augment' and immortalize it. 

But what would it be like to be free from body worship?  To be free from all that pressure to beautiful, tight, handsome, built, etc., etc.?  Jesus can free you from that by placing your eyes on eternity and on your soul, not on your body and the here and now.

"Let us fix our eyes, not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.  For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal" - The Apostle Paul