Alicia Reagan

I was dressed. Hair done, makeup on, the outfit that took extra planning because it had to work for the seat and the temperature and the length of the event. My stuff was packed with everything I carry to leave a house. I'd been looking forward to it for three weeks. And my body said no. Not dramatically. It rarely happens dramatically. Just a change in my stomach I've learned to read the way a farmer reads a sky, and the immediate knowledge that whatever else today was going to be, it was...

“For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.” II Corinthians 4:16. Two things are happening at once in that sentence, and most of us only believe one of them. The outward man is perishing. Paul states it without softening it and without apology, and he is describing something continuous rather than something that already finished. It is happening now, today, at whatever rate your particular condition sets. He does not say the...

The first thing God did for two ruined people was dress them. Genesis 3 is a chapter of consequences, and the consequences are physical. Pain in childbearing. Ground that fights back. Bodies that will return to dust. And then, before He sends them out, “Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them.” He did not give them a lecture on modesty. He did not tell them their bodies did not matter now that the real problem was spiritual. He killed an animal...