Lent 2017: It Was Worth It

Lent: Day 21 of 40

Name: Joyce Han
Lenten Commitment: Exercise every day of the week.

“What should I do for Lent?” 
“What is an idol I can give up for God?”
“Do I want to do something extra instead?”

That was my thought process as I considered what to do for Lent. Eventually, that process led me to think about my body. I mean God took His time to create me and build my body. If I want to show my appreciation, wouldn’t I want to take care of it? So for Lent, I decided to exercise each day of the week.

I thought, by exercising, I would come to notice Jesus more and think of my relationship with Him more because I would get a better idea of how God created and shaped me. By taking care of my body, I thought I could get to know how much care God put into making me.

Now you may ask… how did it work out? At first, it was hard to justify working out because I could not visualize any of the results. Instead of being excited for what would happen next, I only saw it as a challenge since I could not see the results and from being busy and being a lazy bum. 😐

It was even harder because I was exercising right after school and I was tired and had a lot of homework to do. School got me tight with my schedule and the lack of time had me stopping from exercising… and being myself, I was too lazy… I mean everyone can relate to that… am I right? But I got myself to exercise by reminding myself it was not for me, but it was for God.

Noticing my unhealthy habits and trying to exercise, I got a higher appreciation for a healthy body. I thought that exercising was just a little thing to give to God but then I realized that I was lucky to be able to exercise when there are so many people in the world who physically cannot.

One day, I slipped while I was running on the treadmill and burned my skin, but I noticed that it didn’t really hurt. I feel like I could feel God’s presence for once during that moment and I took that time to enjoy that sensation even as I did something small like put a band-aid on it.

Now you would think this would lead to some sort of happy ending right? Um… nope! Even though I thought I would notice God more, it did not occur to me as much as I thought it would. I think this happened because when I began noticing results from my exercise, I stopped focusing on how God made me and ending up focusing on getting more results. I was thinking to myself, all this time, I could have just worked out to get better healthy eating habits and a body.

But wait, what happened to the reminding yourself that it was for God and not you? Well… guess what? I forgot… As simple or as cheesy as this answer might be, it is true.

However, I want to get better at this by digging deeper into the Bible through my quiet time. By spending some time reading the Bible deeply I think I will get a better idea of what God wants to say to me and help me think of Him more and me less. Doing Q.T. so far has helped me learn that God is always going to accept me as who I am. Even though I may be selfish, God will still love me. For sure, more than what I expected to learn, I learned that God will love me.

I hope that for the rest of Lent I can get better at noticing God in my life more. So even though I will stop exercising at the end of Lent, I am glad that during this season, this experience taught me something valuable. Next time for Lent, I would like to try other things that can make me notice God more.

I like to mark different journeys on my history list so that when I grow up, I would get to look back and see the amazing things that can happen with God. Even though I can be selfish, God loves me anyway because He made me. And even though I am selfish, I am glad I can share this experience with others so that they can learn from my experience. And even though slipping off a treadmill surrounded by people was embarrassing, it was worth it. 🙂