What Does It Mean to Be Healthy?
I love new ideas—specifically, new ways to optimize my life. Longevity hacks, morning routines, marathon training plans, and health tech (Oura Ring, baby!). Almost without realizing it, I've gone all in on optimization.
But do you notice? Do you hear the word hiding underneath all this? Health. Every hack, routine, and wearable is a health product. Optimization is our culture's health plan—the promise that the right protocol can make you well. As a result, most of us have learned to define health as optimization. But those are two very different things.
Paul was astonished that the Galatians so quickly deserted the grace of Christ for another one. It wasn't willful rebellion; it was subtle, incremental bewitchment. "Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?" Let's give that a modern translation for us strivers, us spiritual leaders: Having been saved by grace, are you now trying to manage your own life and your own wellness under your own power?
You see, the false teachers weren't selling immorality.
They were peddling a spiritual health plan.
The writer David Zahl has observed our collective presumption that "there exists an ideal version of you, and your main assignment in life... is to enflesh that apparition by whatever means necessary." There's an ideal you buried under your unoptimized life—under your mistakes and poor sleep—and, this is the real allure, you have the power to manifest your best self. Your health is under your control. It's intoxicating. It's also incomplete. Every promise to deliver your true self almost always delivers more anxiety. The popularity of self-optimization, Zahl says, is "a measure of the exhaustion, dissatisfaction, and discouragement many feel today." The issue underneath the issue is a soul-level weariness.
Self-optimization isn't making us healthier; it's making us tired.
So what is health? What does it mean to be healthy? Well, when sin and spiritual unhealth entered the human story, they were ushered in by what Alan Noble calls "radical autonomy." Adam and Eve wanted to "be like God." Sin is refusing dependency; it's anything we say, think, believe, or do in an attempt to make a life without God. Shame and weariness follow quickly behind. When we believe maturity and health are about ever-increasing self-reliance and optimization, we can never rest. Silently, every need and longing becomes a secret failure—another shortcoming to optimize. Autonomy is the sickness, not the remedy.
Jesus never told a branch to optimize itself. He said, "Apart from me you can do nothing." A branch has one health metric: is it connected? Spiritual health isn't the absence of need. It's abiding in the one who meets you in your weakness and weariness. Jesus came for the weary: "Come to me... and I will give you rest." He offers a yoke—a dependency you can finally rest in—and, at last, wholeness as a beloved child.
So let's stop trying to become the person we were always meant to be. Instead, let’s become who we already are. Let's draw near to the one who has already come close. That's not a lesser life. That's health—a life, connected to the vine.
_________________
Written by Jason C. Helveston
Galatians 1:6-7 - "I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel - not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ."
Galatians 3:1-3 - the line quoted is v. 3: "Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?" "Bewitched" is v. 1; Paul's phrase for the false story is being "perfected by the flesh."
Genesis 3:4-5 - the serpent's promise, "you will be like God" (v. 5); see the whole account, Genesis 3:1-13, for the fall and the shame that follows (v. 7).
John 15:5 - "Apart from me you can do nothing." Jesus' vine-and-branches image runs through John 15:1-8.
Matthew 11:28-30 - "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (v. 28); the "yoke" and "rest for your souls" language continues in vv. 29-30.
1 Corinthians 6:19-20 - "You are not your own, for you were bought with a price."
David Zahl, "Against Self-Optimization," Plough, July 2025, https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/health/against-self-optimization. Both quotes in the post ("there exists an ideal version of you..." and "the overwhelming popularity of the push for self-optimization...") come from this essay.
O. Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2025), chap. 1. Noble's title comes from the Heidelberg Catechism's answer to its first question: "I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ." "Radical autonomy" is his name for the modern assumption that "you are your own, and you belong to yourself."
All Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV).