Churches for Health
When you go to visit a church, the subject of health is not necessarily one that springs to mind immediately. Yet when you think about it for a while, it makes a lot of sense to think on just how a person's health could improve by regularly visiting a church. We now know, thanks to advances in medical and physiological understanding that one of the leading causes of ill health is actually stress. When you visit a church, it is a place of calmness and peace, where the stresses and strains of everyday life get left behind and the body and mind both get a chance to really de-stress and relax.
Beating Stress
It's pretty obvious that when you can relax and let go of all the cares of the world for a while, your entire body relaxes. That means all the stress that may have been coursing through that body is allowed to drain away, allowing muscles to un-tense and relax. This is a great benefit to a person's health, because a relaxed body is a body that can get on with doing what it is supposed to do, which is to self-heal and self-repair. Stress gets in the way of that process, so by eliminating stress, you eliminate the obstructions that may have been preventing your body from healing itself.
We know for a fact that the immune system which is there to combat any illnesses that try to infiltrate our body's, is much less effective when we are under a lot of stress. Again, remove the stress and you remove the degrading effect on the immune system, so it can get on with its job of preventing illness and infection getting a hold on our bodies.
There are so many ways in which stress has so many negative effects on our bodies and our minds too.
Body Weight
Its a big subject lately, but with so many people getting overweight and obese, its no wonder that people are turning to all sorts of quick fix remedies to try and overcome the problem, often with lackluster results. Stress is also partly responsible for weight gain as it depresses the digestive system and suppresses that body's metabolism, which we need to be working at its optimum to burn off the extra calories we are loading into our bodies through a poor diet and overeating. Stress itself is directly responsible for overeating as it causes us to feel like snacking on unhealthy snacks even when we're not hungry.
Remove the cause of a problem and the problem usually goes away of its own accord. So remove the stress and you remove the need to snack or overeat! It may not be a direct means of attaining effective weight loss, but by reducing stress you at least reduce the problem that can make matters worse. While you can't account for people eating a bad diet, you can at least address the problem of eating too much of it!
Mental Health
Another aspect to the problems that stress cause can be seen in some forms of mental health, such as depression. Stress may not directly cause depression, but it has a big hand in bringing the situation about. When a person becomes too stressed through worry about something, then it can act as a brake on the body's central nervous system and retard the person's ability to think clearly and logically. This in turn causes some confusion and the inability to work through the problem that was causing the worry in the first place. The natural progression is depression when the person starts to feel overwhelmed and unable to cope with the situation any more.
Visiting a church and relaxing and getting in touch with God can work wonders when all other avenues seem to be closed. A great quote comes from the Rev. Michael Beckwith that is so relevant: "Stop telling God about your big problems and start telling your problems about your big God."