The Invisible You

[This post is in a weekly devotional series called Everything New. Sign up here if you’re interested.]

If someone were to ask you, “Who are you, really?” a complete answer would have to include something about the invisible you, the part within and apart from the body. One of the truest things you can say about human beings is that there is so much more than meets the eye.

Yet we play to the eye.

Think of someone you know who, by most people’s standards, is extraordinarily handsome or beautiful, a picture of health, possessing a vivacity that turns people’s heads-but someone empty on the inside.

At 36 years old, Marilyn Monroe, one of the best-known female icons of the 20th century, who was sought for the best movie roles and the most popular magazine covers, took an overdose of pills to end her life. By becoming larger than life, almost revered as a goddess, she lost her inner self, and she put the icon in the grave.

The outward self can profoundly contradict the inward self.

The belief that we as human beings are nothing more than chemical factories changing oxygen and food into energy day by day until the factory breaks down and we die, is extraordinarily hard to maintain. It is not for lack of trying.

Many philosophies and religions limit themselves to the certainties of what we can touch and measure–things such as fingers and eyeballs and the amazing network of nerve fibers in the body. Proponents of this idea say, listen to common sense; what you can see is all there is. It’s all there ever will be. The sum total of a man or a woman is what can be placed on a scale or in a coffin. And yet, like a great hot air balloon that refuses to do anything but ascend, this idea that we are more than our bodies, that there is soul, that we’re not done when we’re dead, keeps rising in most people’s convictions.

We are body and soul, which throughout our lives are inseparable. One person, with two major aspects: the external (visible, fleshy, sensory), and the internal (thoughtful, moral, volitional). Your spiritual reactions come from the experiences you have with what you see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. A husband loves his wife well when he does it with devoted thoughtfulness, emotional understanding, and physical touch. God’s greatest command is that we love him with heart, mind, soul, and strength.

Our visible and invisible selves are like the relationship between house and home. “House” especially notes the physical thing, whereas “home,” though not separate from the house, points to the greater spiritual reality, a living thing. You repair a house, but you live at home.

Now there is that unique moment when the spiritual self is separated from the bodily self–when the last breath is exhaled and, like Jesus, we can pray, “Into your hands I commit my spirit.” It is that time when our “earthly tent” is destroyed, when we go from being “at home in the body” to being “away from it” (2 Corinthians 5:1, 9). How will we ever comprehend this as long as we are creatures of the earth? None of the stories of spirits haunting houses and ships or even having friendly exchanges are truthful or helpful. What the Gospels teach is that Jesus told the thief on the cross, “today you will be with me in Paradise,” and Paul said that he knew that if he had to be “away from the body,” he would be “at home with the Lord.”

Next time: what does the Bible mean by body, soul, spirit, mind, etc.?

Excerpt from Putting the Pieces Back Together: How Real Life and Real Faith Connect. Free DVD available now.