Your Desire Drives Your Discipline

Reading: Luke 10:38-42

Delight yourself in the LORD and He will give you the desires of your heart. Psalm 37:4

Long before the first plate goes on the barbell or the first drop of sweat hits the mat floor. Long before someone checks out a gym on-line or starts to get recommendations on where they should work out. At a point in the life of everyone who begins a journey of physical fitness, something ignites a desire. The lives we live are birthed from our collective desires. In today’s culture, desire can have a somewhat negative connotation, almost like a guilty pleasure we know we shouldn’t have. When I say desire, I’m talking about your core motives. Your desires are the set of images, goals, and thoughts that drive the output of your life. For athletes, that output is known as discipline.

It’s funny to link desire and discipline in the same sentence because no doubt some of you were raised in a home where your desire did give way to discipline. Only it was punishment for something you did wrong. You desired to sneak out, so you were disciplined by being grounded. In the athletic mindset, discipline is not something that happens to you as a result of being bad or breaking the rules. Although burpees may feel like that sometimes. Discipline, or rather disciplines, are the ordered ways in which we live our lives. They are the practices, or habits, that fuel the journey to reach our desires. Here’s the thing though – disciplines don’t tell the whole story. As a coach, I’m in constant search of an athlete’s desires. Because desires change. The discipline of coming to the gym five days a week won’t sustain itself if your desire is to PR every time you walk in. It’s simply not possible to be stronger or fitter every 24 hours for the rest of your life. Of course, that sounds silly when you read it, but have you ever stepped on a scale after 24 hours of “low carb” only to be disappointed because you didn’t lose weight? The starting point is all about desire, and honestly, sometimes it’s really hard to look our desires in the mirror. What looks like a desire to lose weight is really a desire to look better than all your friends. The desire for better results or heavier lifts may be a cry to be affirmed and showered with praise. And yet there’s something even deeper going on inside you. I call this your core desire.

The core desire is the one thing from which all things flow. Your physical and spiritual lives are intricately connected. It’s impossible to separate them because you have feelings you can’t see driving everything you can see. When we talk about training spiritual fitness, what we’re really doing is stepping into an awareness of the wholeness of our humanity. We are body and soul (or spirit if you prefer), and you can’t take those things apart like Legos. When you train the body, you engage your soul. And when you engage the disciplines of spiritual fitness, over time they have an impact on not only who you are, but how you are.  Your life will become most abundant when you order the habits, or disciplines of your life around this core desire – To know and love God.

Everything that we do, from prayer to meditation to journaling to gratitude should be driven by a desire to know and love God. And we have been given the capacity to do this because God first knew and loved us. Think what life would be like if things like financial freedom, material comforts, and career success all flowed from the desire to know and love God. Those results would be from the overflow of ordering your life around this core desire. People driven to succeed at all costs will do whatever it takes to make it happen. They will sacrifice relationships and become prisoners of their own pride. People driven to know and love God will sacrifice their needs for others. Success has more to do with who they encourage than how many zeroes are in the bonus check.

Over the course of the next year, I’ll be introducing you to spiritual disciplines, or workouts you can begin using in your life. Some of them will be completely familiar to you, and others you may have never heard of. The spiritual disciplines lose their value when ordered around any desire other than to know and love God. That’s not to say they won’t work. These aren’t some secret magic phrases, instead they’re simple practices. But just like physical fitness, core desires have more to do with results than you realize. So, here’s your first workout. Every Minute on the Minute for three minutes start by saying this phrase – “I want to order my life around a desire to know and love You, God.” Then for the remainder of the minute I want you to think about things in your life that either support or hinder that desire. You’ll do it for a total of three minutes. At the end of three minutes, take three more minutes and write down the things that popped into your head. Title one list “Support,” and the other “Hinder.” Repeat the workout two more times in the same week so that by the end of seven days, you’ve done the workout three times. Use the same paper each time so you can add or subtract from your lists. Believe me, things will rise to the top. I then challenge you to share the results with a friend, a group of friends, or if you’re up for it, post the results to your favorite social media app and add @hopeinatx to your post so I can join the conversation. 3-2-1-Go!

Burn The Ships

Reading: Romans 6:15-23

History recounts the story of Hernán Cortés, the Spanish Conquistador who discovered Mexico and eventually defeated the Aztecs. In the year 1519, Cortés made voyage to the New World with 600 men and a vision for victory. When his men finally all made it ashore, Cortés sent one of his ships back to Spain and burned the others. His message was clear – there was no going back. There was no retreating to the safety of the ships. And in the event his soldiers might encounter something so challenging they wanted to turn back, there would be nothing to turn back to. The only way was ahead, not behind.

I believe we all face “burn the ships” moments in our lives. I’m not talking about conquering another civilization, but rather conquering the thoughts we hold about who we are. We all know people who are stuck in the past. Most of us can remember the one guy who still showed up to every high school party even though he was 22 years old. He even wore his old letter jacket! He would tell the same stories about the same great plays and all of us would nod our heads as if we had never heard them before. There are times in your life when you’re that guy. You’re stuck in the past. Your mindset about who you are and what you’re capable of needs to change. It’s time to burn the ships.

Living into a new vision of yourself doesn’t mean forgetting the past. For the soldiers under Cortés, watching the ships burn didn’t mean they forgot how they got there. When you realize it’s time to let go of your pride or your ego or your fear or your anger, don’t expect all memories associated with that way of thinking to vacate your head. You’ll never forget who you were, but one day you’ll realize that’s no longer who you are. Here are two practical things you can do when life presents you with a “burn the ships” opportunity.

The first is retrace your steps. Long before a marriage ends in divorce or someone feels handcuffed to their six-figure salary or their six-figure debt, there are steps people take toward these outcomes. You’ve taken steps too. In fact, it’s the culmination of these steps that led you to the point you’re at right now. Sure, we can try to blame things like fate or luck or karma, but in reality, it’s about the choices we make every day. When you begin to understand how you got to where you are, you can decide to head in a new direction. Burning the ships means owning the past and no longer letting it own you.

The second is find people who reflect the qualities you desire and spend time with them. If you want to be a more consistent, fitter athlete, join a community of them. Because they don’t care about your excuses. Most of them once believed that they couldn’t or wouldn’t too. But over time, they burned the ships loaded with their excuses which means yours won’t have any effect on them. However, their commitment to fitness and diligence in training will have a HUGE impact on you. The same is true in life. If you want to stop feeling like a victim of the circumstances of your life, quit hanging around with people who remind you what a victim you are. Sure, it may feel good for them to console you and reassure you, but how’s that really working out for you? My perspective on life continues to expand as I surround myself with people who don’t live by the same constraints I do. Community breeds confidence and this new confidence will be more than sufficient to burn your ships.

For too long, I struggled with letting the ships control my life versus trying to control them myself. That’s a losing battle. The wins fuel your pride and the losses make you feel powerless. In Spiritual Fitness, we acknowledge that God is the only One with the power to burn our ships. It’s not about declaring yourself a failure and waving the white flag, it’s about trusting in something greater than you. No doubt you’ve put your trust in many things over the course of your life. And given enough time, all of them have or will fail you. But not God. God’s vision for your life is restoration. Let Him burn your ships as you trust Him for all your future holds.

Barbells Are Fragile

Reading: Acts 1:1-11

Claaaannnggg. The sound rang out across the entire gym echoing off the walls. The experienced athletes cringed, waiting to see what fate awaited the rookie weightlifter. All eyes followed the coach as she graciously, yet expeditiously, made her way to the scene of the crime. The equipment in front of the athlete confirmed what she, and everyone else, suspected had happened. Anxiously, the rookie athlete watched as the coach picked the barbell up, surveyed it for damage, then carefully set it back on the ground. As she stood, she quietly, but firmly said to the wide-eyed athlete, “You don’t ever drop an empty barbell. Empty barbells are fragile.”

If you want to get your coach’s attention, drop an empty barbell. Here’s a tutorial on what not to do. I mean, even from shin height, you’ll have a coach at your station faster than when you PR. It’s a learning process for new athletes and we get it. They see these videos of people lifting incredible loads with barbells. They see the barbell bend at the strongman competitions, yet never break. Well, almost never. They watch other athletes in the gym on deadlift day finish their final rep and feel the floor shake as their barbell drops to the ground. But what they don’t yet realize is the barbell by itself is fragile. What seems like a simple piece of steel is actually quite complex. Inside the collars, or the ends of the barbell, are bearings – small balls or needles that allow the barbell to spin. When you load a barbell with weight, it’s the weight that ultimately receives the force of a drop, preserving the barbell from severe damage. Empty barbells must bear the force of the fall directly, and over time they will simply lose their effectiveness or break altogether. A barbell is strongest when it is connected to an external load. That’s where it becomes most powerful.

In life, you’re essentially an empty barbell. You’re fragile. I know we all think we’re tough and can handle what life throws at us, but truth be told, it only takes one or two “bumps” in the road to reveal just how fragile we really are. And I don’t mean physically, I’m talking emotionally and mentally. We’re all one crisis away from breaking. Next thing you know, we’re yelling at our kids, fighting with our spouse, distracting ourselves on social media, drinking one more glass of wine, you name it. These are all coping mechanisms we turn to when life shows just how fragile we really are. While they may bring temporary relief, they don’t provide the strength or power we need to live a purposeful and fulfilling life.

In Spiritual Fitness, we start with the power source. We ask the basic question, “Where does your help come from?” In other words, what’s the source? Until you tap into the right power source for your life, you’ll struggle forever. It’s true. And here’s a hint – it’s not your own power. You’ll constrain your life around your comfortability because if you stretch you know you might break. You’ll live by karma, in fear that something bad is lurking around the next corner. Fulfillment in life doesn’t come from your own power, it comes from the strength that only God can provide. When you load the barbell of your life with the strength of God, you’ll experience a power you’ve never known.

It all starts with three words – God help me. And then tell Him where you need help. Maybe you need help because you just became a home-school teacher while still trying to maintain a full-time job. Maybe you need help because you just can’t forgive that person for what they did to you. Or maybe you need God’s help to realize you are loved just the way you are. God’s power is not made perfect in your perfection, it’s made perfect in your weakness. But don’t wait on a catastrophe to call on the Creator. See for yourself just how much more satisfying life can be and how over time the things that used to get to you just don’t anymore. The journey of Spiritual Fitness begins with these three words – God help me.