Why You Need to Take Care of Your Body (w/ Fr. Mike Schmitz)
5/7/202610 min
We can fall into two traps when it comes to the body: believing the body is nothing, or believing the body is everything. Both are distortions of the truth.
Fr. Mike Schmitz reminds us that we are both body and soul. Your body is part of who you are, and your soul is part of who you are, so caring for both matter.
At the same time, St. Pope John Paul II warned against the “cult of the body”, the idea that our value is determined by appearance, fitness, or physical perfection.
Your worth is not defined by your body, but caring for your body can be an act of gratitude toward the One who gave it to you. How can you care for your body today?
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsMike Schmitz· Host0:00
Wait a second. This is Ascension Presents. I didn't come here for fitness advice. I came here for my soul. We are body and soul together. Like, the human being is not just a soul trapped in a body. What we are is embodied souls, or we're ensouled bodies. Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz, and this is Ascension Presents. I'm sure at some point [laughs] uh, we've all heard these words or we've uttered these words, "Why can't you just take care of your stuff?" Me or my siblings, we'd leave our, our bikes out on the lawn or something, and they, they'd get rained on, and my dad would be like, "What the heck? Why can't you take care of your stuff?" We'd leave the basketball in the, in the driveway. We were playing basketball and again, leave it out in the weather. My mom would come out like, "What's the point of us giving you this thing if you're not gonna take care of it?" That's something so essential for us as Christians. Why would the Lord give us something if we're not gonna take care of it? I came across some statistics recently that roughly three out of four Americans are either overweight or obese. Less than twenty-five percent of Americans actually are, are physically fit. These numbers have, have doubled or these stats have doubled since nineteen ninety. So in the span of one generation, we've had this, this massive, this, this shift of some sort. And now, wait, I don't wanna hear this. I don't need to hear this. Maybe you don't. Maybe, maybe you don't want to, maybe you don't need to. But I think it's important you are your body and your soul. And so because of that, right, we-- because of that, we know that it actually matters. God gave us a soul. He gave us a body. God could say the same thing about our soul. If we're, if we're driving it off a cliff, he could say, "Why should I give you this thing if you're not gonna take care of it?" The same thing is true when it comes to our body. Our