There’s a posture that requires no words.

My friend Kevin stood on the Yorktown Fishing Pier at sunrise last week, arms stretched wide against a sky bleeding orange into gold. I’d asked him to hold the pose while I captured it—this silhouette of surrender, of praise, of a body saying what the mouth sometimes cannot.

I’ve been thinking about what our bodies say. What we affirm without speaking.

After a difficult weekend—one of those stretches where hard words land like stones and you spend hours turning them over in your hands—I found myself replaying the negative labels. Some had been thrown at me. Some I’ve thrown at myself for years: I’m old. I’m damaged. I’m not enough. The best is behind me.

I’ve never been able to make typical affirmations work for me, those statements that are primarily self-praise. “I am worthy. I am beautiful. I am enough.” They ring hollow when I say them to my reflection. It’s easy to lie about myself.

But it’s difficult to lie about who God is, especially when I’m surrounded by His grandeur in nature at the sunrise every morning.

A few years ago, I learned about replacing negative self-talk not with generic affirmations, but with truths about the character of God. It’s essentially spiritual cognitive behavioral therapy—rewriting the narrative not with what I wish were true about me, but with what I know to be true about Him.

So I tried it again, standing at the water’s edge on Sunday at dawn:

I might be aging, but God’s not done with me yet. I might be damaged, but I’ve been redeemed and restored. I might not be enough, but God is more than enough. My best days cannot be behind me because as long as I’m alive for another sunrise, He is working all things together for good.

See, affirmations aren’t, by definition, positive. They are simply statements we affirm to be true. We can affirm negative qualities as easily as positive ones. And whichever ones we choose, we make them true through repetition—the slow, steady work of self-fulfilling prophecy.

I’d rather stake my identity on the unchanging character of God than on the shifting sands of my own self-perception.

That particular sunrise was monochrome, foggy. My husband and I didn’t really talk. I journaled and processed while he sat in the stillness of the pier at dawn. We drove to church in the quiet that follows hard conversations, walked inside hand in hand.

And then we sang.

“Great Are You, Lord” by All Sons & Daughters isn’t a complicated song. It’s mostly one repeated truth: It’s Your breath in our lungs, so we pour out our praise. But when we reached the bridge, something shifted.

All the earth will shout Your praise / Our hearts will cry, these bones will say / Great are You, Lord

Tony doesn’t typically sing during worship. But I heard his voice join mine. And when those words hit—these bones will say—he wept.

I gripped his hand tighter, our voices intermingling, creating harmony in praise to the Author of our sunrises.

I don’t doubt that all the earth will sing God’s praise. It already does—when the sun crests the horizon and the birds cry out and the rocks come alive with reflected light. Creation doesn’t struggle with affirmations. It simply declares what is true.

And sometimes, so do our bones.

Sometimes praise isn’t pretty. Sometimes it’s tears streaming down your face in a church pew after a hard weekend. Sometimes it’s a silhouette on a pier, arms stretched wide, body saying what words cannot.

Sometimes the most honest affirmation isn’t about us at all.

Great are You, Lord.