Exercise

"What does the enemy have to gain by convincing you to never deal with your past because your mind will never make it all the way through? It is a lie from the pit of hell. Today, claim your healing in Christ. It is your right as His child." - Beth Moore

      Every Monday morning I go through the same battle.  I wake up at 5am and after I have reached up blindly pushing buttons on my phone to shut off the alarm, I open one eye.  There it is.  Approximately, 5 feet away from the bed is the beast, otherwise know as the Nordic Trac.  The minute I see it, I have to close that one eye to rest it or maybe it's in hopes that I didn't really see the beast.  Maybe someone really hauled it off in the night and I only imagined it.  When I find my courage and open the eye again, I see it.  It is really there.  I immediately start whining to God, "I asked for a deep desire to exercise.  I thought you would be on my side on this one."  I can barely lift my hand to wipe the drool off my face, let alone walk a few miles on the beast.  God, what are you doing to me?  Don't you want me to lead a strong and long healthy life?
     Okay, okay, I'll get a cup of coffee and get right back up here.  I watch a 30 minute show, while I drink coffee, but then I see that the author they are interviewing is offering a book on the subject God has been talking to me about.  After the show, I order the book to my Kindle and just take a quick glance at the table of contents.  Then a little look at the first chapter.  Then I check Face Book, throw in a load of clothes, and end up in chapter 2.
     Here's the deal God, I have too much to do.  Seriously, I will start next Monday, because I know I will feel better once I do it.  I will feel stronger and have more energy and more of a drive to get back on the beast the next day.  I know I will sleep better.  I know all this God, really I do.  Yes, I also see that I have put on a couple pounds, haven't actually put on a pair of jeans in a couple months, and I'm tired all the time.  I get it.

     There was a time when I started each day like this, but I was talking to God about spiritual exercise.  I'm not awake enough to read the Bible.  I'll start praying next Monday.  Really, I will.  I think a lot of us at first fear that following Jesus will be boring.  It's not.  Then I think a lot of us fear the healing.  Healing hurts.  I remember saying over and over, "I don't want to go back there,"  I was talking about the past.  Who wants to dig up that stuff? 
     If you were to compare the spiritual exercise of cleaning up your past and the damage it's done to doing the same physically, we would be on the treadmill with baggage strapped to us, full of sweets and super sized helpings of fast food.  We would be trying to do push ups with our wrists tied together with the chains of midnight snacks and double dessert portions.  Physically, emotionally and spiritually, hurting people spend their lives saying I will get healthy one day.  One day I will put the energy into it. 
     Why don't we want to do it?  Well, because it's like a broken bone that healed incorrectly and we are going to have to re-break it to get it healed right.  It is going to hurt.  Why would God put us through this?  I heard a great sermon, I wished I would have heard before I started digging through my baggage.  It still helped because I still have a few bags to go.  I'm not saying one pastor ever gets everything right, or that my interpretation of what he said is accurate, but this is what I heard and I needed to hear it.  I even looked up the names for a better chance of having them right and so I wouldn't have to say "You know that guy who..."   Here goes... forgive me for any mistakes.

     The people who wouldn't believe in God after they made a 40 year trip out of an 11 mile or day (ha) walk all died.  No promise land for them.  One other thing they didn't do that they were supposed to, was circumcise their sons at eight days old.  Now, Joshua is leading these guys into battle and God tells him to do the circumcising of these men.  Note - Fathers usually circumcised their sons, but because their fathers were dead God sent Joshua to do for them what they missed out on in their childhood.  That alone is so cool.  Right?  Not the end of the story though.  They were to take down the walls of Jericho, but these guys are in pain.  They have been through some pretty heavy stuff.  I will never understand this, but I can only imagine.  The one time in the Bible where God says, "Just walk around the walls and shout, is when He has an army of hurting units.  Ha.  He cared about their pain.  These walls were so thick that chariots were driven on top of them, but they came down with walking, trumpets and shouts.  Maybe they were shouting in pain?  People say God doesn't give us more than we can handle.  I don't agree.  I do believe He gives us enough that not only do we call on Him, but we see that it has to be His strength that got us through.  He has shown me this numerous times over the last year and a half.  He cares about our pain.  He weeps with us.  He laughs with us too.  One more point that was made in this story was things that should have been dealt with in childhood hurt a lot worse when we deal with them as adults.  Even if this story isn't accurate for what ever reason, the end result is the same.  Jesus loves us.  

“Every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will 'turn the necessity to glorious gain.”
― C.S. Lewis