God,
Only you could encase
bone and blood
with flesh, and then say
You are made in our image.
Treat each other with inherent dignity.
What does that even mean Jesus?
Have you seen my pathetic body.
It grows in peculiar and hilarious ways,
until it starts to fall apart.
And I have to feed and water it every couple of hours.
Don’t even get me started on the sleep.
It is almost as if you made us so complicated for a reason.
It is almost as if we each body was handmade with unique flaws,
to show the creative artisanship, so that we can stop and wonder.
God, made in your image you say.
Ok, I say, let me see dignity
less as perfection
and more as embodiment.
Breathe with me God,
Embody with me Christ, I pray.
Amen.
Feel free to use/adapt/Share with Credit to Pastor Katy Stenta
This Prayer also fits into a “This Here Flesh” Sermon Series Resource
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Author: katyandtheword
Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ.
She is an writer and is published in Enfleshed, Sermonsuite, Presbyterian's today and Outlook. She writes prayers, liturgy, poems and public theology and is pursuing her doctorate in ministry in Creative Write and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible.
"Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal.
Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times.
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katyandtheword 
The thing I like most about this is the humility of your being. You are beautiful in the eyes of God no matter how odd you might feel parts of you are… I could add lots to the defunct list… the post three kids bladder strain, the heart that’s been sick, the wrinkles setting well in, the hair going grey, but while the world might view all that as inadequacy, I like to think God sees the fact that I live with these and still keep trying as what makes me a good and loyal follower…