“That’s just who I am, and I have made peace with that.” I could not help to eavesdrop on the conversation going on next to me. The gist of the whole thing was that the man speaking those words had come to grips with himself, more specifically, with his weight and whatever other dynamics that go along with being a large person. I struggle with that statement every time I hear it. There’s something good and even healthy in realizing who you are, and as the Bible says we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” Understanding that God created us uniquely and for a purpose is a great place to be psychologically because culture tries hard to define for us whom we should emulate, how we should look and act. It’s comforting hearing from people who do not buy into all  of that. But there’s a darker side of that statement…

“That guy works hard, but he has looked the same for the past year,” was the remark. It was true. The man at the gym we were watching was no slacker. He had been hitting the weights hard for nearly an hour and the sweat dripping down his face was proof of his commitment. Sadly, however, he had not made any gains in muscle size, weight loss, or definition for a long time. While there are a lot of factors that go in changing one’s physique–from genetics, to diet, exercise form, etc–one thing stood out to me: he has had the same exercise routine since I had first noticed him. As I contemplated this man’s dilemma, I thought of all the effort we put in other areas of life with seemingly little or no return. It’s part common sense, part human nature to press on towards a break through. If…

Sometimes we need goals that have nothing to do with our careers, financial future or performance.  From time to time I find myself focusing on seemingly inconsequential, somewhat irrelevant goals that from a glance can be seen as a distraction from some of the critical parts of life. For me these usually are fitness goals: run a marathon, have my personal record on a race, do a certain number of pull ups or drop to single digits in my body fat (if you know how much I love to eat, you’d know that’s almost an impossibility). So why bother with them, you might ask.  Here’s what these goals do for me. Forced disciplined. I’m a disciplined person by nature, but when I’m focusing on a fitness goal I get in a whole new level of commitment.  Interestingly, that discipline spills over other areas of my life including professional and relational.…

Assumptions don’t always work out for me.  Well, I could sanitize the word a bit and call it a “myth” or an “erroneous supposition,” but at their core, these are lies that I have treated as facts. Some are as innocuous as “if I train hard I can be a competitive runner.” Well, If I train harder, I could potentially be faster than I am now, but I’ll never be a 5-minute-mile elite athlete. But then there are lies that can derail your entire life. One of them has cost me a lot of pain until I came to grips with it. Somehow early on my childhood I believed that if I couldn’t be the best in doing something, than I shouldn’t even try doing it. If I couldn’t do it at a 100 percent, than I would do nothing at all. That sounds like crazy talk, doesn’t it? After…

We are only three weeks into the New Year and I have seen people toss their new year’s resolutions aside. The signs are all over the place: the couple with the matching warm up suits is gone from the Y, the “salad eaters” have gone back to the Chinese Buffet and,most unfortunately, Bedside Baptist has claimed a large number of would-be worshipers. But not all of us who made resolutions have given up on them. I, for one, am sticking to my guns. I have been physically active for several years and last summer I began training for triathlons, but I had never considered running a full marathon until a friend talked me into joining a running group, Innerstrength, late last fall. This has been a great experience in perseverance. In the past few weeks I have run under unimaginable conditions. I remember in the past driving to the gym…