How can I sing the Lord's praises if I feel fat...forever?

I don't know about you, but I don't like my body. I've gotten used to it because it gets me around places, but overall, I could do without it. I am fat. Not obese or anything, but I am certainly not thin, or anywhere close to that. My best years were quite some time ago, when a week of working out actually produced some glimmer of hope. Nowadays, after having turned thirty a couple years ago, my metabolism has slowed even more, so I feel even fatter. Excuse me for a minute while I eat a couple cookies to get over it.

When we're teenagers, our awkwardness was Painfully Obvious, especially when we looked at the ease by which the popular kids gelled their hair and looked kick-ass in their expensive clothes. For me, a lot of it was the dawning horror that my baby fat was still clinging to me like a security blanket, refusing to go away. I started getting larger shirt sizes because the ones I normally wore were highlighting my inelegant adolescent fatness like a neon sign. I wasn't the 98-pound weakling: I was the 198-pound endomorphic fool with little girl breasts and a stomach best suited for the widescreen presentation of "How the West Was Won."

Okay, a little bit of hyperbole but you get the point. Most of us deal with our less-than-perfect bodies as we get older -- especially when we get into our thirties and slip into real people's bodies and don't mind getting larger pant sizes at Eddie Bauer.

But a few years ago, I came across a very weird book called "The Physics of Immortality," by Frank Tipler. It was a book about resurrection...and the physicist author's proof that we will all be resurrected at some point (called the Omega Point) in the future. And that's when it struck me: you mean I have to spend eternity in a body that I never really liked while on earth?

Homer described the deathless gods often in terms of their beauty, and the denizens of Olympus were indeed, eternally youthful requiring nothing but ambrosia. But when we think of resurrection and eternity, do we consider what our bodies are going to be like? We assume that physical resurrection means a body free from blemishes or defects, but as someone who has never had a physical ailment and have never possessed a frame that I've been comfortable with, what does this actually mean for me? Will I get to choose what kind of body I'd prefer to spend eternity in, or is what I dragged around earth the only option?

A popular answer might be that it just won't matter: i.e., those earthly concerns about my physical self have no place in a heavenly realm. But if I'm lucky enough to get there and we spend day and night in the celestial temple of the Lord, shouldn't I look my best?

What exactly is the point of resurrection? What purpose does it possibly serve, if most people's religious beliefs like to picture an afterlife where we are with friends and family (unless you're Southern Baptist, where eternity is laughing endlessly at the pain of the damned, which is just about everybody who isn't Southern Baptist). Or that we are going to be re-united with God. Or that we will just generally in a perpetual state of bliss -- provided, of course, that we merit this bliss in the first place.

So many of the world's religious beliefs center around a person's soul. In the West, we talk about the "spirit and the flesh" as two entities locked in combat with one another, with the spirit being the more superior aspect. We talk about meeting soul mates, kindred spirits and psychic connections with one another, and consider those bonds inherently better descriptions of how we feel internally. We talk about "being spiritual," which for many of us is a way out of following religious rituals but staking out enough of a claim just in case. Even then, we consider being spiritual as more valuable since it enables us to experience the divine in myriad ways without needing to convert.

So if the spirit is eternal and indestructible, what is the need for a physical resurrection of the flesh? To be sure, even if we conceive of an afterlife, we picture ourselves as we are now, in our bodies being with loved ones, but it's doubtful that many of us actually ask, what do we do before a physical resurrection? If we have an idea of a spiritual afterlife, what can more can resurrection accomplish? To demonstrate how perfection could be on the temporal plane that we just exited? For those with a belief in "the world to come," this temporal plane is imperfect: what purpose is temporal perfection via resurrection if we believe that our souls are going to be at play in Elysium?

Tipler in his book worked from the perspective that a universal resurrection is a fact that will definitely occur, and that prompts us to ask: so what happens in between the moment of death and resurrection? He states that we are, for all purposes, in a state of sleep, so that the soul that dies could have experienced death thousands of years ago or just minutes before a universal resurrection. But he never explains why a resurrection is necessary in the first place, and so many of our popularly held religious views fail to explain it also.

Especially for those of us duly unimpressed with what we're stuck with on earth.