**Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Body in the Prison Cell**

In the winter of 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer sat in a cramped cell at Tegel military prison in Berlin. Guards expected the imprisoned pastor to wither — to let his body slouch into despair, to abandon the disciplines of a free man. Instead, Bonhoeffer rose each morning and exercised in his tiny cell. He kept his body clean, his posture upright, his routine ordered. He wrote to his friend Eberhard Bethge that the body was not something to be escaped but something to be honored, because it belonged to Another.

Bonhoeffer understood what Paul told the Corinthians. The believers in Corinth lived in a city drowning in the motto "everything is permissible." Temple prostitution was casual. The body was treated as a throwaway vessel — use it, indulge it, discard it. But Paul pushed back hard: "You are not your own; you were bought at a price."

Bonhoeffer lived that theology with his actual flesh and bone. Even facing execution, he refused to treat his body as meaningless. He dressed carefully for visitors. He shared his rations. He understood that every sinew and breath was on loan from the God who had purchased him.

Your body is not a rental property you can trash before moving out. It is a temple — bought, claimed, and inhabited by the Holy Spirit. How you steward it today is an act of worship to the One who paid everything to dwell there.