this coming Tuesday is a time when lots of people in the church world enter into a period of subtracting something from their lives in an effort to attune themselves to what's deeper beneath the surface. it's a time of focus and intentionality that hopefully allows them to live better and less distracted lives... lives connected to something bigger... lives of meaning and purpose.
i personally like having periods of experimentation that invite change. being totally honest, my story can always use a good shake up. so here's my challenge to the MTL crowd for the month of March just around the corner: communicate better with your body. you have been given such an amazing gift of life through a miraculous and wonderFULL body and all too often we take it for granted. now, before you totally write me off, please hear me when i say that I am talking about MORE than exercise and eating "healthy." i believe that we undervalue what our body tells us. in other words, we don't listen to our bodies. a few stories to illustrate what i mean... what do you do when you get sick? i finally just kicked a cold that knocked me down pretty good. of course when i say, "knocked me down" i don't mean that i stopped my life as usual... who does that? i just mean that i took copious amounts of medicine and felt horrible all day long while i endured "normal" and couldn't believe it took so long to get better. that's my typical sick story. my body signals me and tells me something while i do my absolute best to ignore my body. so i take medicine to silence what my body says and hope it will just be quiet and stop talking... cuz i have stuff to do... places to be. of course there are the times that i truly do get knocked down, probably because several episodes of what i just mentioned accumulate and my body refuses to be ignored any longer. about two weeks ago i took Tate (my youngest boy) out on the mountain. he skied and i rode. we decided to practice hitting some jumps. i fell more that day than i care to admit. : ) in the end, i tweaked my knee and i still feel it. did i stop running three times a week? no. why? i guess routine. did it hurt to run? yes, but Advil seems to do the trick. one of my boys recently hurt one of their fingers and then repeatedly told me how it hurt when he pushed on it a certain way. and i said what my parents said, "so don't push on it like that." so true right. our bodies give us advice that we should really hear. sadly we just tell our body to stop talking because we know better. what is your body telling you? are you paying attention? how can you listen better to your body? how can you respond in a way that says, "i'm listening." up next: communication is a two way street. so when i say that we need to communicate better with our bodies, we have to do more than listen to our bodies... because our bodies are listening to us. what are you telling your body? that's what's next.
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These posts offer further reflection on topics we tackle during MTL nights.
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