Godly Hormones?

There is a sweet young girl I know who is about 13 years old and just started "developing" this past year.  And she seems a bit lost with what to do with it.  Gone is the little girl from the beginning of the year.  Now she is wearing tightly-fitting, breast-accentuating shirts and seriously short shorts, thick make-up coats her face, and she seems preoccupied with how "sexy" she believes herself to be viewed by others.  She wants to attract.  And this is, to some extent, understandable.  Her body is developing, preparing for the day when it may be her time to give life to another human being, and in getting ready for that her body is focusing her attention upon how much "attention" she attracts.  The sad thing is that she believes the lie fed to her by the media and friends at school that wearing these clothes and such is a good way to go about doing this.  

At the other end of things, when my time had come, I went to the hospital like I was in a life-threatening situation or something.  Doctors hooked me up to medication to control the contractions, even though there were zero signs of any problem with my body's own contracting ability, because that's just what they do in our country.  The contraction-inducing medication made it hurt all the worse, and so I ended up getting pain medication.  Then I was so numb that I couldn't feel the muscles that I was suppose to use to push the baby out, and so the doctor used a vacuum to pull the baby out along with my body's contractions.  Then they handed me the baby, and we began to bond.  Hormones naturally fly in a mother's first moments of contact with a baby.  Few medical professionals deny that the first hour is critical to the bonding process, which is critical to the necessarily incessant motivation on the part of the mother to care for the baby 24 hours a day and successfully breastfeed.  All of this bonding is facilitated in part by natural childbirth.  My baby and I had to work harder than necessary to develop the strength of bond that ought to have come easy, because people kept taking her away from me.  And I didn't trust my hormonal instincts that were screaming - give me back that baby!  I interpreted them as potentially selfish, certainly not a God-given instinct.  Why do we take it as just a given that depression rates in women following child birth are so high in our country, that breastfeeding is so often unsuccessful, that mothers exhaustedly try to care for their babies without the natural hormonal aids given by God?  (For the record, besides these issues, the United States has the highest mother mortality rate in the industrialized world, and the second highest infant mortality rate - and in most of the rest of the world all of this distrust of the mother's body when it comes to birthing is nonsense.  In fact, seventy percent of births in Europe and Japan are facilitated by a midwife.)

I've been thinking a lot about these issues recently.  And, in particular, I've been thinking about them from the perspective of how I think about hormones.  For years, since I was myself a teenage girl with a developing body, I was under the impression that hormones are "bad."  Female hormones, in particular, are really bad - they do things like make you have inconvenient periods and "mood swings."  There is nothing of redeeming value in them.  I learned not to trust them.  They might lead me to do something unholy.  Better to just ignore them as much as possible.

But when my time had come, and I held that baby in my arms at home, I discovered quickly that I could not nurture this little life day and night without them.  And as I have reflected upon my experience giving birth and raising my daughter, I've come to realize how holy hormones really are.  They are God's invention.  Eve's sin might have made childbirth painful, as the story goes, but Christ has redeemed that.  We don't live in that era anymore.  We are new creations.  Certainly we in the church ought to be able to affirm the inherent goodness of at least some of our hormones.  

I know it is not this simple.  There are issues of "the flesh" leading us to things that really are not holy.  But I think there is a real difference between hormones under the lordship of Christ and hormones gone nuts in the direction of an imitation, a substitute, something other than the God-intended use.  If my little 13 year old friend gives herself over to her hormones like her attractiveness is the source of her self-worth, there is going to be trouble.  When she gives herself over to fulfilling her desire to be attractive no matter what type of attention she is attracting and no matter what unhelpful thoughts she is provoking in the other sex's brains, there is going to be trouble.  If I try to use my natural high that comes from constant contact with my baby as a substitute for finding my ultimate satisfaction in Christ, there is going to be trouble.  But, at the same time, if "all things are sanctified through thanksgiving by the word of God and by prayer," the hormones themselves are not the problem.  Today, I thank God for them.