from A Word of Grace for Your Monday-4/16/12

by Kent A. Hansen
khansen@claysonlaw.com

Dear Friends,
On a Monday morning, facing the steep climb of the work week ahead, I take grace from wherever I can find it.

I find grace this particular morning in an observation of Patty, my fitness trainer. She meets me twice a week at the physical therapy clinic and attempts the difficult task of making my 58-year-old body strong and fit.

Patty is a calm and intelligent woman who laughs easily. She is compact and athletic as befits her profession.

Her first career working with at-risk youth in a continuation high school, broke her heart with so much damage and unfulfilled potential. So she turned to training. Patty has a healer's gift for restoring and strengthening bodies abused and weakened by injury and neglected diet and exercise.

She works me hard, but watches carefully to see that I don't hurt myself. This morning she turns out to be as much my chaplain as my trainer.

I am on the second of three sets of 15 repetitions of squats while lifting a weighted bar that is balanced on my shoulders behind my neck. "Look up," Patty tells me. A few squats later she again says, "Keep looking up." So I lift my head and push on through the set.

Before I start the third set, I ask her, "Why do you tell me to look up?"

"If you bow your neck," she replies, "you are giving in to the weight and it will press you down. If you keep looking up, you will lift the weight. Looking up makes all the difference."

"I understand," I say. "What you are telling me has a far wider application than exercise."

Like I said before, I take grace wherever I can find it these days. This is a little story with a big point.

We all carry loads, often of staggering weight and comprised of all kinds of things picked up in the struggles of living. We bow our necks to the loads, give in to them, and try to carry them with deficient strength. Not surprisingly, the weight increases and presses down until it breaks and crushes us.

The proper form for dealing with our loads is to keep looking up to the Lord with total focus of our body, soul, mind and strength. Like Patty said, "Looking up makes all the difference."