Saturday, July 6, 2024
I’ve come to appreciate challenges, downturns, and depravity. This is hard to understand for many because most of us avoid pain like the plague. But, the plague will find you.
Look at life like a bodybuilder looks at a dumbbell. It’s heavy. It’s unpleasant, but there is a reward for picking it up. Maintaining a healthy physique requires some degree of pain, tons of mental focus, time and energy, and a desire for results. Calorie restriction, physical movement, and resistance training, as repulsive as they seem to the unwary, they have enormous attractiveness in their rewards. The scientific literature is overwhelming in support of “resistance training.”
Most humans use resistance the wrong way. We push away what seems unwanted. The act of pushing away is resistance. Avoidance is resistance. When faced with a challenge, we’d rather fight to keep it away, or get foul about it being there. It’s a double bind. But like a weightlifter befriends the pull of gravity, using it to their advantage, so too can we use challenge in the same way. The question is, do you pick up the weight and strengthen your muscles? In Matthew, Jesus says “Take up your cross.” Pick up the dumbbell.
If you try to push away challenge, you’re creating conflict. When you curse the dumbbell and wish it gone, you create tension with no reward. Moving achy joints makes the pain go away. Facing challenge, embracing it, lifting it up, and dealing with it fearlessly and with no fuss is what ultimately dissolves it.
The weights aren’t too heavy. There is some tug and pull, but you can lift it. You can beat it. You can make it go away, not by avoidance, but by picking it up, carrying it, and then dropping it. Befriending the resistance and dealing with it is the only way out.