After coming back from
vacation and stepping on the scale, I knew I had some serious catching up to do
with my weight. So I decided to step it
up at the gym while beginning to carve back on my calorie intake.
Eager to achieve new
heights at the gym, I jumped straight in with chest workouts. Any weight lifter knows that taking a few
weeks off results in some muscle atrophy leaving you a touch weaker than before.
Therefore, you need to invest some time to
gradually get your body back to the strength that it was before you took a
break from the gym. Well, I pushed that theory
aside and went straight for my maximum lifting weight plus an extra 5lbs. In my sheer determination, I was able to do a
few sets of 6 reps of my maximum lifting weight. But, just when I was feeling good about
myself, something happened that has never happened to me at the gym.
I was on my 5th
set of bench pressing. I was aiming for
6 reps as before, but I could tell it would be a push, as my arms were shaking
on the 2nd rep. I had barely
pushed out the 3rd rep, and the 4th rep should have been
my indicator that I was finished. But I
was determined to get to 6. As I was
lowering the weight to my chest on the 5th rep, a thought flashed
through my mind. When you are in an extreme
workout, the last thing you need is a random thought to pop into your mind to
break your focus.
Well that’s exactly what
happened, a stressful thought about work popped into my mind and I began to get
anxious about it. As I was lowering the
weights, my mind wandered to this situation at work and I began to get
anxious. I started thinking about how I
could fix the problem in order to make it go away and how to prevent it from
happening again.
Then I remembered I had
a couple hundred pounds of weight I was attempting to lift. The problem now was I had no motivation to
lift it as it rested on my chest. My
anxious thoughts stole all my motivation in that moment. As I laid on the
bench with the weight on top of me I thought to myself,
“just grunt like a man and lift it.” So
I did, but the weights did not budge. I
tried it again and again, and I could not lift the weight even a half an inch. I was pinned.
So I looked around me for someone to help, and there was an old
gentleman with a walker to my left. I
hollered to him, but he didn’t hear me (probably a good thing). So I did the only other thing I could think
of, I prayed. “God I really need your
help right now, the issue at work will be taken care of by you, I don’t need to
sweat it, but I am sweating this situation right here right now, could you
offer me a hand?” And then with
everything I could muster, I lifted the weights off of me and re-hung them.
(This was nothing short of a miracle)
It
was a vivid reminder to me about the need to trust in the Lord in all that we
do. Peter was able to walk on water, as
long as he kept his mind on the Lord.
But the moment he focused on the troubling waters around him, he began
to sink. Only the Lord was able to pull
him out of his situation.
If
you feel as if you are sinking or are pinned under a stack of weights in life
and you cannot seem to move them, ask yourself, “Have I taken my focus off of
the Lord and placed it upon myself? Have
I stopped lifting my requests up to the Lord and have attempted to fix my
situations myself?” Anxiety will cause you
to sink in life and will steal the God given motivation from you to live life
to its fullest. But if you lock into a
relationship with Christ, you will be able to do more than you have ever imagined,
as He will set you free from your anxiety and strengthen you to conquer the
day.
“The
Lord is my strength and ever present help in times of trouble”.
