I'm Pressin' On

In an earlier post, in respect to this weight-loss challenge, I said, "as I discipline my body, I pray that God will use it as a parable in my life as to how I can better run the race He has set before me."

I've been thinking a lot about the different areas of life we set goals in and how we plan to achieve them.  Whenever I have a physical goal to meet, I always worry that I am going to get too focused on how I look and get caught up in my external person, rather than cultivating my inner character.  So, when that started happening this time around, I decided that I was going to stop obsessing  about it and just put exercise and eating right in its place. Then I felt like I started failing--big time. Exercising was going well, but self-control toward eating? Not so well.

So, I asked myself, "How do you strive to meet a goal?" You visualize the finish line, you think about all of the hard work and sacrifice it will take to get there. In your mind, you measure out how you should be doing at each mile marker if you want to finish the race in time. It is okay to think about what you would like to look like or what you want your "final number" to be. In fact, it is important to mentally pace yourself and set smaller goals or milestones along the way that help you to understand that you are on your way toward meeting your goal (you just can't get so focused on one goal that you lose sight of all others). That's why Paul says in 1 Corinthians 9:26, "So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air." We have to have something to strive toward.

Likewise, I think that in our Christian walk we have to have something to strive for. We cannot go aimlessly about performing tasks that seem "Christianly" or hope to soon reach that plateau where we have "arrived" and can now relax in our mediocre Christianity.  An athlete always reassess his body to make sure that he is in the shape he needs to be for the next race. This means he is always living in light of the next race. We should saturate our minds with Christ and be living in light of heaven. If our minds are not saturated in this way, how are we going to be motivated to take the hard paths of self-sacrifice and others-focused living? If our minds are not saturated in this way, how are we going to have the strength to choose honoring Christ over honoring self? Our hearts and minds need to be trained up to that like-mindedness of Christ so that, just as the athlete's body will react to the stimulus without any instructions, we will be able to respond to situations as Christ would without thinking. Not that we won't stumble or suffer injury. We just might be able to run without getting one of those terrible side aches. :)