Pamela Anderson and Theological Twerking

I got pulled down a Babylon Bee hole this morning.

As far as holes go, the Bee hole is probably my favorite. Air conditioning, great snacks, and chuckles that will probably come back to me on my deathbed. They were satirizing the mainstream media’s attempt to pretend that even though they blatantly lied through their teeth about a few rather important things (this isn’t a political blog, so I will let you fill in the blanks, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style. The beauty of this is that, at least as regards the media, you could all come up with a different answer and we could literally all be right. Huh… guess that was a teensy bit political, wasn’t it? My bad), and because I don’t stay up on the news, I got curious about what was being so hilariously poked at and I began clicking things. You know how it is. At some point, you feel internal resistance to being the only person in the nation who apparently has no idea what “twerking” is or what it has to do with Miley Cyrus, and so you click.

(For the curious among you, if you are old enough to read this blog, you are too old to twerk without herniating something. Just leave that hole alone.)

My venture into the wild Bee yonder reminded me of the low-grade irritation I always feel when I try to do research of any kind. Now, I will admit to ineptitude in internet searches. Somehow any time I try and enter symptoms into the internet or find out the best way to lose belly fat, the answer I always get is cancer. And that could be true! But is it helpful? I put it to you.

One of the recent holes I feel into involved ancient grains and the nature of healthy food vs. weight loss healthy food. Friends, I think I am being lied to. Having my chain jerked, as it were. This cannot ALL be true! Fruits are bad for you because they spike your blood sugar or you can eat fruit whenever you feel peckish and it will wean you off of cake? Carbs are actually the devil, the literal devil himself, or only certain kinds of carbs are minions of hell and others will actually help you live 14.5 years longer? Never eat bread… unless it is made with spelt?? Eggs are a great source of nutrition, especially if you are trying to kill yourself via heart attack. And ancient grains are magical, though no one seems to know why, but hi-ho-cheerio are they high in calories, so if you want to lose weight, you would probably do better to eat a Little Debbie’s rather than a bell pepper stuffed with farro.

Don’t even get me started on exercise. Stress could make you gain/hold on to weight. So you should knock that off. How about you do yoga? Unless you’re already fat, in which case yoga is not even going to make a dent (not to be confused with a “dimple,” which you, presumably, already have and in all the wrong places) and you had best jump into HIIT workouts. They will slaughter your knees like a Passover lamb, which, ha-ha, actually is kind of stressful and have we seen this tree before?

There appears to be no right answer.

And then, my personal favorites, the Instinctives. There is an entire discipline (if my tongue goes any further into my cheek, I worry I will never find it again) that insists that our bodies know what they want and that the key to looking like Pamela Anderson (yes, I just made a Baywatch reference. Did I not mention that I was on the internet today?) is just to learn how to listen to your inner hungry panda and –watch me coin a phrase– if it feels good, do it.

I tried it a few years ago and it turns out, my body must have been doing shrooms when I wasn’t looking, because the only thing that it ever wanted was Lucky Charms and (spoiler alert), even after listening to my body, I look nothing like Pamela Anderson. When I ran along beaches in plunging hi-cut swimsuits, children fled and sunbathers wondered if they accidentally looked straight at that glowing orb of light and heat, because suddenly everything was looking a little blurry. And those are the ones not rendered immediately unconscious after getting thwapped by a bouncing thigh or worse as I ran by. You understand “ran” is sort of a euphemism for “trolled,” right?

But as foolish as it is for me to try and learn the secret of gaining a Baywatch body in the next, eh, 3 months (did I mention that the Superior Nephew is GETTING MARRIED?? He totally is! And she is adorable. Of course. I mean, we haven’t met, because I suspect the Nephew is trying to hide me from her until the last possible minute so that she will not spike her bouquet, turn tail and run, and really? I don’t blame him. Just because he is at the top of my resume doesn’t mean I expect it to be mutual. It’s not like I expected him to tell me himself and was crushed to have to hear the news through his mother. No, no. We are beyond such things. But you see why it would be ok with me to show up to said wedding looking like Pamela Anderson, right?) by squirreling about on the interwebs, it is moronic to the nth degree to do the same thing to get instructions about how to live a life that looks like Christ.

The Apostle Paul warns us in the book of Ephesians to give up being childish, being thrown about by every wind of doctrine. Christ is sufficient. His Word is infallible, true, and never contradicts. In His Word, He shows us how to feast and fall. We see who we are, and what He came to do about it. His Word is entirely consistent; it is not grace on one page and work harder on the next, but rather grace has set us free to work out our salvation in gratitude and joy. It is cake and farro, you might say.

So grow up. Knock off the whims that draw your attention, the idols that tempt you to abandon sound teaching, the lies and the lures of the world, the flesh and the devil. Love Christ! Hunger for His Word! And then consume it, and watch His Spirit shape you.

It’ll be better than Pamela. I promise.