I run.
Not always very well, and at best only as a reasonable amateur, but I run. I don't always like it, but I know that I enjoy it more when I'm better at it, so I have to force myself out the door at the start of the season. After a long, fat lazy winter I'm just starting to get back into my sporadic stride.
So, this week, I didn't manage to run until Friday. Things were more important on any given evening, excuses and procrastination abounded. Each time I put running back until tomorrow I felt completely justified, but when I put it off again on Thursday I felt I'd let myself down. Friday came and out I went, lacking energy but pounding the pavement anyway.
The thing I noticed was the correlation with my spiritual race. In the same week that I failed to run, even though a part of me really wanted to, I also barely cracked open my bible. Very little time indeed was devoted to the Jesus I intend to pursue. It wasn't a horrible week, don't get me wrong. I wasn't out there murdering kittens or beating my wives. I just took my eye off the ball and suddenly, it was Friday and I coasted through my week making no progress in either of my races.
Oh well, no great shakes perhaps. I'll just have to do better next week.
How are you all doing out there with you're races?
I had a conversation with a friend on Wednesday which puts me in mind of your post. I realised (not for the first time, and certainly not with any great surprise) that I don’t live by faith. That is, I don’t need my faith to live, or survive.
ReplyDeleteNow the theologically minded will probably disagree, and I agree with them in theory, Jesus is the only thing sustaining me (and this world), not only in the next life but in this one too. But practically, day by day, I can do very well without him thank you very much.
Jesus isn’t the air I breathe, and perhaps there’s another clue: delayed gratification. (Not that I want to go on about living in an instant, consumer society, because it’s becoming a cliché, but...) watching the latest episode of House or tucking into hot chocolate fudge cake seems so much more rewarding that whatever I may reap in the weeks or months to come by my action, or in-action, now (and the fact that I’m currently reaping the biggest numbers I’ve ever seen on my scales and a lack of vision and drive, also doesn’t seem to motivate me to change).
I have a friend who loves Jesus, I mean _really_ loves him. She went away for a weekend recently and came home complaining that she felt empty and dry because she hadn’t had the opportunity to pray and read her Bible, and I guess there’s the catch 22, ‘I enjoy it more when I’m good at it’.
In the words of another friend of mine ‘I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do’. So maybe we should try out Romans 7 - if the cap fits.