Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, we must get rid of every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and run with endurance the race set out for us…
Hebrews 12.1 (NET)

I’ve had enough number crunching posts that I’ve bored one of my most favorite readers, and I can’t afford to lose her and cut my numbers in half!  So I’m going to write on something else that has been extremely helpful to my race. A cheering section.

Admittedly, there is one person I credit towards getting me off the starting line, my wife Angie.  Last year she started WeightWatchers, and she needed my support.  She told me if she was going to be successful, she needed to know that I was in it with her.  I joined WeightWatchers and started logging my points and began to see progress without much of a feeling of starvation.

But there are several others that had an influence in me as I started down the track.  I am an avid consumer of the social media, at present I have connections to my family, high school friends, church family and a great host of online friends that share my passion for LOST and other quality television shows.  Some of those friends had shared their successes and challenges with getting in shape and losing weight with their community of friends, and I was blessed to be a witness to some very encouraging stories.

The table to the right shows my connections to date, and I do not post those to brag, but as a reminder and encouragement to myself that I have a great number of friends that are watching and encouraging me in my race.  I also use two other sites, RunKeeper and DailyMile to track my exercise and have found more friends and partners on those sites.

Their commitment and motivation to their races, only fuels my motivation to keep on trucking in my race. It always so encouraging and humbling when I have a good day, or good weigh-in to have many of my friends comment and congratulate my progress.  It’s heartening and welcome to get friendly reminders from my contacts when I struggle or have an off day.  Their mere presence sometimes makes me want to shed the “stuff” that can easily clog my mind and thoughts and let them drop aside as I continue my progress.

There is a chapter in the Lose It! book entitled Do These Friends Make Me Look Fat? that examines the importance of the social network around us.  It cites studies that show a correlation between our relationships and our waistline. That doesn’t mean I need to drop all my fat friends and go find some healthy thin friends.  The encouragement is this: When you start to lose weight, and share it with your friends, they start to examine themselves and they start to change.  By taking control of our lives, and sharing it openly, a butterfly effect kicks off with those around us, and we might not even consciously know it.

Online social media sites are so prevalent and such a interesting tool to use, so I’ve begun to remind my self that even though I might think that I’m insignificant (self-worth is one of those things I struggle with) I have a lot of people watching me.  I’m thankful to all my friends (online and offline) that share their interests in music, movies, pop-culture, religion, faith, nutrition, exercise and a genuine joi de vive! that I only hope I can influence them a fraction of the impact they had on me.

So, the weight-loss key for today, and the challenge to you, is to share.  Share where you are now, and share where you want to be.  Whether it is your neighbor, a relative, or just randomly tweet it or facebook post it.  Share your goals, and then start working to make them a reality.

For me, I still have a ways to go, so this is my reminder.  One-hundred and five pounds left to go!  Thanks for giving me the daily pushes I need to know that isn’t impossible.

I run because, frankly, I love to eat food.

Which is probably as good as a reason as anything else.   In the past 42 years, I’ve eaten a lot, and if I was honest, I recognize that I’ve avoided pretty much anything that would balance the scales to make my lifestyle anywhere close to healthy.

If you’ve followed my social media streams, you may have noticed that I’ve made a turn this past May and started incorporating regular exercise in my weekly routine, for one reason to help in my goal to lose weight, and the other is because, frankly, I love to eat food.

This morning at church, our pastor (interim) encouraged us again to study the bible.  I’m a sunday school teacher, so I do that, each week.  But if I’m honest with myself, it’s not really studying.  It’s more like saying, I walk from the car to the elevator, and calling that exercise.  The phrase about running, because he loves food echoed in my thoughts, and I had an epiphany.

I love television, perhaps too much, perhaps in the same way I love food.  Loving food isn’t wrong per se, but when my love of food is out of balance it becomes unhealthy.  Same with consuming popular culture, out of balance and it becomes spiritually unhealthy.  I need to give myself some balance.

Sort of like my weight loss plans, I cut down on the intake, making better food choices, and incorporated exercise that allows me to still enjoy eating food, and also delivers the exertion that my physical body needs.  So in my spiritual diet, I need to cut back on my popular culture intake, make better choices as to how I consume television, and have something spiritual to offset the dose of popular culture and provide my spirit a connection with the Almighty that is needs.

So in that endeavor, I’m going to get back in to a regular bible reading plan.  As a way of using the social media that has been helpful in my physical life style improvement, I plan on blogging about what I read. I don’t promise a daily epiphany, or even any words of wisdom, more just a bit of my thoughts and the scriptures I peruse.  Again the purpose here is accountability to myself, not preaching to you, my readership.  If these posts don’t satisfy, just skip them, just like you might my exercise and weigh-in updates.

I’m sorry.  To the four people that read this blog, I know, I’ve let you down.

But maybe I’ll turn it around and start my random digressions (it might be another di-word) as there are plenty of good things going on to write about.

Like how I started WeightWatchers March 30,2010 and have lost 10.8 pounds as of last week. 

Or, like how I started walking, with the intent to jog. I’ve walked/jogged/treadmilled 24 miles in the last two months.

I’m still Editor-in-Chief-ing at LOSTblog, but have a bunch of awesome helpers to keep the blog fresh, they want to do a full series re-watch, so I’ll be part of that, but not every episode.

I’ve got 9+ months of recovery under my belt, with the end in sight of my Celebrate Recovery step study that’s been really helpful in my examining my life, my emotions and a fruitful productive output for my sometimes self-destructive side.

So I have some boring things to write about, that I must tell the internet.  So stay tuned!

Jonah is a nice short book, you can read the whole thing in a few minutes, but it’s so layered and rich, it bears a lot of contemplation, and reflection.

But first, let’s grab a verse from Jeremiah that I ran across in my other quiet times.

The human mind is more deceitful than anything else. It is incurably bad. Who can understand it? – Jeremiah 17:9

That kinda begs for some context, doesn’t it?  I’d read the surrounding passage, and it describes ‘one who trusts in man, who depends on flesh for his strength, and whose heart turns away from the LORD.’  The passage describe him becoming like a bush in the wastelands… dwelling in the desert.  The examination of the heart/mind in verse 9 is the final determination of this man.  Our only hope is to trust in God.  Outside of that we are doomed to the selfish nature of our deceitful heart/mind.

Jonah understood that perfectly.

And he still did the exact opposite of what God asked of him.  In the belly of the fish, he was thankful to God for his rescue.  He gave thanks and rededicated himself to God’s mission.  And with fish guts still in his ears he trekked to Nineveh, and did as God bid him, and proclaimed their impending doom.  They listened, and repented.

The God did exactly what Jonah knew he would do.  God had compassion and cancelled the destruction.

That ticked Jonah off. Why? Because Jonah knew that He would do that.

How odd.

Thoughts?

The show itself is masterfully produced, the themes a seemingly endless maze of twisty little passages all the same. Going back to the beginning and re-watching it my thoughts return to what might be the best starting point for a potential möbius strip through time:

BLACKIE: I don’t have to ask. You brought them here. Still trying to prove me wrong, aren’t you?

JACOB: You are wrong.

BLACKIE: Am I? They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.

JACOB: It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress.

This is the struggle where our beloved Oceanic survivors were plunged.  I view this series through my series of lenses, part geek, part pop-culturist, part husband, part father… However, the over arching filter is that of my faith, and the more I watch the early episodes, the more I’m reminded of a passage from the bible:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. – Ephesians 6:12 (NIV)

We have been viewing the continuing drama from the eyes of men, and have allowed the hidden battle of two mystical opponents to be obscured by the characters we’ve grown to love.  A struggle summed up by John Locke while explaining a game of backgammon to Walt in the series pilot.

LOCKE: Backgammon is the oldest game in the world. Archeologists found sets when they excavated the ruins of ancient Mesopotamia. Five thousand years old. That’s older than Jesus Christ.

WALT: Did they have dice and stuff?

LOCKE: [nods] Mhhm. But theirs weren’t made of plastic. Their dice were made of bones.

WALT: Cool.

LOCKE: Two players. Two sides. One is light … one is dark.

Seeing the characters from the beginning with that perspective shines new light on everything. Our characters, are they nothing more than pawns played against each other in an unseen game, where chance, choices are played along with strategy and foresight on behalf of higher powers?  Is Locke’s guru like wisdom, as we observe early in the first season could colored by influences of one side versus the other?  Do the manipulations of the various factions in the struggle effect the different passengers on the flight, and start to ripple outwards as we’re introduced to more of the inhabitants of the island?

Those questions along with others are worthy of inspection as we’re introduced again to Rousseau and Ethan, the mysterious, nameless whispers in the jungle, the shrouded others that plot against those plopped on the island by the coincidental fluke in the crash of Oceanic flight 815.

I’ll use this space to ramble more as I worry these thoughts in the back of my mind.

Namaste.

²¹So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. ²²For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; ²³but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. ²⁴What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? ²⁵Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!
      So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.

Romans 7:21-25 NIV

This passage shows that the struggle for a Christian is much different than someone that hasn’t accepted Christ.  A Christian seems to be having a dual nature, one that delights in God’s law, and a parasitic flesh that rebels against the law.  This duality would seem horrible trap should we end the passage right there, a constant struggle between sin and obedience.  We desperately need to get to the next sentence:

¹Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, ²because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. ³For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, ⁴in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.

Romans 8:1-4 NIV

No condemnation for this struggle?  Is that what it says?  Why do we struggle with such guilt when we fall?  Is that another part of the flesh? the willingness to flay ourselves for less than perfect obedience?  We need to remind ourselves, constantly, that we are free. We need to remind ourselves, constantly, we are dead to the fleshy way of life.  We need to remember that the spirit is there to help us in our struggle.  We live, not according to the flesh, our sinful nature, but according to the Spirit, His perfect love for us.

This is grace: ‘For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering.’ God’s requirements, met by God, freeing us from the penalty that we’d otherwise be doomed to pay.  It is already paid in full.

Well before the worlds of tweets, facebooks status updates, and blog trackbacks, message boards were how I interacted with the masses of people that shared a common interest.

This community shared an interest in christian themes, but had a bit of disfunction running through it. A group of us split off and thanks to the husband of one of our members, started our own message board. Heady times before the onslaught of social media, to have an almost instant community of friends.

The message board still exists. Sometimes I even, post there. But largely the community has moved on. I moved on to blogging, and that has had it’s ebbs and flows. I still keep track of a few of my friends from The Pizza Parlor, as we called it. Some are now facebook friends or twitter followers. Many are just faded Yahoo! Messenger nicknames, always hidden because life moves on.

I look back now, fondly, at those sometimes unhealthy times of Internet absorbtion. Who I am today, was formed in the crucible of yesterday. I experienced 9/11 with the people on that bored, formed many opinions based on those interactions. Learned that while I could ‘turn off’ the computer, these people still lived and cared ( well maybe not Melissa, and I sometimes wonder about Wilbo ) about me.

Social networking is weird sometimes, I met my wife on a pre-Internet social network. We wrote letters back and forth using emoticons in 1993, while I was on deployment. Social networking is part of who I am.

Being sifted is not your regular brand of temptation. It’s an all-out onslaught of the enemy to destroy you and cause you to quit.  It surfaces what you detest most in yourself and reveals the ugliness of self.  Not everyone has or needs such an experience.  — Beth Moore on Luke 22:31

which leads us to Romans 7… picking up in verse 18

I know that nothing good lives in my, that is, in my sinful nature.  For I have the desire to do good, but I cannot carry it out.  For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do — this I keep on doing…

… What a wretched man I am!  Who will rescue me from this body of death?  Thanks be to God — Through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Head on into chapter 8, and pick it back up ~ verse 15:

…And by him we cry out, “Abba, Father.”

(~v. 26) … In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness.  We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us…

Renew my mind, Lord.

My purpose is to give life in all its fullness — John 10:10 (HCSB)

I decided to post this daily walk post today because of the first paragraph in the devotional text:

It takes courage to dream big dreams.  You will discover that courage when you do three things: accept the past, trust God to handle the future, and make the most of the time He has given you today.

Last Sunday we talked a bit about procrastination, in regards to Jesus’ parable about the 10 virgins.  Procratination wasn’t the spiritual thrust of that parable, but the living each day application can certainly point to what procrastination does.  It steals from yourself the valuable time of today, and posts that to a time in the future.  The thing about each day, is they each have 24 hours, each hour has 60 minutes, and each minute 60 seconds.  We can try to maximize our enjoyment by pushing work, tedium etc to the next day, but that only doubles the problem the next day.  How can we stop that cycle.

Consider and accept the past, don’t dwell on it.  Trust God with your future.  Be prepared for today.  Give us each day, our daily bread, goes the model prayer.  The Hebrews were given manna each day to subsist upon.  We have our 24 hours to maximize, and one in 6 meant for rest.

When it comes to procrastination, I’m am the cheif of sinners.  Today, I’ll do what I can to limit that which I put off to tomorrow.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. — 1 Corinthians 13:11 (NKJV)

Lord, may I continue to grow in You, and put away my childish impulses.