I invited my sister to contribute to my 31 days of Courage with a post on courage in strength. As a personal trainer, she advocates building strength in every part by building strength in your body. She understands better than most I've heard that you can't disconnect your faith, your work, your passions, your mindset from your body.
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I take one last inhale of my fall-scented candle and blow it out. It’s five minutes to 7 and I’ve got a little boy with gas and a little girl who will need breakfast soon. My husband is still sleeping. His hour of work turned into 2 a.m. again and his already sleep-deprived body can’t take much more of this. But it must. And it will. Because there is a mission whose importance does not diminish because fatigue has set in.
So I blow out my candle, the one that I light when I am taking the big inhales and exhales while the rest of my people are still sleeping, and I stand up. Time to keep going.
I clutch the one-month-old little boy in one arm and my coffee cup in the other hand. I feel the delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS to the meatheads out there) causing my chest and front shoulder muscles to spasm as I hold him tightly. Soreness from the day before yesterday when I wanted to be done but my husband and most reliable coach whispered, “Do another one, and another one, trust me, I’ve got you, do it again.” Until I had benched near my body weight for 10 reps.
Courage sometimes means walking straight into pain. We do it every morning by necessity – and many other times by choice. If you don’t train yourself to walk alongside fear and pain without faltering, how will you fair when the real moment arrives? In many ways, this is why I chose to pick up a barbell. I say “I chose” because at the beginning, I was a passive participant in the weight room. Physical weakness met mental and emotional immaturity and I floundered. But then I learned to linger in the pain.
Feel the sensation of the weight on your back, threatening to master you. Feel the lengthening of your muscles and the force of their subsequent slow contraction. Five seconds doesn’t sound like that big of a deal but then again, a lot of things sound easy until you are under their weight. Most likely (unless you are used to this sort of thing), your mind will give out before your body does. How is it that a training technique designed to build strength in fewer sets could continuously teach me about how to persevere in the every day?
My daughter has begun to say things like “I can’t” and “too hard.” My only guess is she picked it up from me. Maybe she read my mind all those times I looked at her with empty eyes after she disobeyed me yet again and I was lost as to what to do next. There are many times where the only prayer I can manage is “Jesus, too hard.” It’s in these moments that I get the chance to explain to her, and ultimately to myself, that yes. This life is too hard. We are too small and too weak. We will never be able to endure the pain and discomfort of this world. We must keep pursuing the Light our soul craves. The Bread our bodies require. The Shepherd our weary bones can trust.
In C.S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy return to Narnia as children. They ruled once before as adults, but their memories are foggy and their childhood weakness has returned. Fear and uncertainty creeps in and dictates their actions. The more time they spend in Narnia, however, the more their bodies remember their old skills. And when the breath of Aslan poured into them, they began to look more like adults than children, according to Lucy, with strength and courage overflowing from them.
As they drew closer to the Lion, they began to imitate him.
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