But That Might Hurt!

I was lying in bed the other morning wishing I had kept my big mouth shut. If you’ve been reading this blog then you know I started the P90X routine a while back. What you might not know is that after about 17 days I stopped. Yes, I conveniently left that part out. An inconvenient truth, we’ll say. Hey, I had a great excuse. We moved and for about 30 days during the process I was cleaning, packing boxes, moving boxes, lifting furniture, doing whatever my wife said and sweating through 4 shirts a day during the hottest part of the summer. Moving during a 2 week 100 degree stretch is not the brightest idea, but I lost 7 pounds which by my math put me ahead of the P90X workout. Since then, however, I’ve had problems climbing back up that mountain. It’s a mental thing.

Which leads me back to my big mouth. The night before I told my wife, Sandra, that I was starting P90X again the next morning. Then morning came. I rolled over. I rolled over again…and again. War raged in my head. “Why did I tell her that I was starting P90X today? I’m such an idiot. I could just skip it. She won’t notice. What if she does? It doesn’t matter. I’ve said things before and didn’t follow through. Exactly.” So I fell out of bed and the rest is history. I did the workout and then a few hours later, I was glad that I did, but I promise you, had I not told my wife I was going to, I would have definitely let it go.

 My point? Accountability. I did not want to look like a loser one more time to my wife and that’s what motivated me. We need to allow someone in our lives to hold us accountable on important issues. Iron sharpens iron(Proverbs 27:17), but the important element here that may get overlooked is that you have to be rubbing up against iron…not something soft, flexible, squishy and gives way on impact. These things may feel good at the time, but they make us dull and cause us to lose our bearings, who God made us to be. My kids and I visited my sister and brother in law in the mountains and we went hunting for arrow heads. We found a few and I asked my brother in law, C.W. what the Native Americans used to shape the arrow heads which were made from quartz rocks. He said other rocks, harder rocks. The harder rocks were utilized to chip and shape the quartz rocks into something usable. If we are going to be usable as Christ followers, we need to allow some harder rocks into our lives and chip away at everything that does not look like Christ in our lives…and then not get mad at them for doing so even though the chipping away can hurt. I have two rocks in my life, Joel and Arthur, who do that for me and I am thankful for you guys. Keep it up, there’s a lot more work to do and I guess I need you here early in the morning because I did the P90X that one morning and haven’t done it again since. I’m getting soft…in more ways than one.