Hidden Work

Learning to love moving my body.

I have never been one to enjoy working out. For most of my life, it’s been a painful, shameful, fruitless activity. In the seventh grade, a doctor informed me I had to stop playing sports and avoid high-impact activity due to pain in my feet that was causing me to walk with a very pronounced limp. This news came days before the seventh grade basketball tryouts, in which participation is mandatory… try walking your layups in front of a gym full of your middle school peers and see what that does for your confidence.

It’s taken 30 years, quite literally all the days of my life, to establish a regular rhythm of moving my body. For as long as I have been indwelled by the Holy Spirit and sensitive to the power of conviction, God and I have been talking about what it means to steward this body — this one body I have graciously been given to carry me through this life. And for just as many years, except for a few different seasons and circumstances, I’ve really just chosen to go my own way, much like Eve in the garden. Until recently. Towards the end of last year, conviction, holy discontent with my disobedience, and a broken foot and second foot surgery, brought in to clear view an understanding that a body is a grace and the stewardship of it is not only obedience, but it’s a get-to more than it is a have-to. So day by day I’m trying to yield to the Spirit and practice obedience by learning what it looks like to pursue a healthy relationship with movement, food, and my thought life around these things and my body. 

This work has been hard, progress has been slow, and while there’s very little external evidence of this endeavor, internally God is up to something big. This is the first time in my life I’m pursuing health not to chase a size or a number on the scale, but for the sake of stewardship and sanctification, and it’s changing my life and freeing me up in ways I don’t yet have the words for. But I know that change is happening, slowly but surely. 

I closed all watch rings every day in May… you know, the ones that track movement and exercise. It started as an accident and then became a goal, and it’s really not a big deal because how accurate are these things anyway? But it is a deal because it is a small, visible, external evidence of this hard and holy internal work that has been in progress for months (okay, years). Internal work around the way in which I think about, talk about, and steward the body I’ve been given. Internal training in obedience and an understanding that God is worthy of whatever he asks. It’s a small, silly metric but it is one tangible bit of evidence that God is doing a new thing in my whole person — heart, soul, mind, strength, and body. 

There are lots of things we do in this world to get and stay healthy or to practice obedience that no one may ever see or acknowledge… making the counseling appointment, taking the medication, waking up before the sun and the kids to be in the Word, choosing the stairs, establishing the boundary, choosing to use a different tone in the way we address our mother or husband or child, the list goes on. This unseen obedience, or hidden work as Abbey Wedgeworth called it a few weeks ago, may be hard to recognize externally, but it’s the internal yield that’s transformative. There is a reason that Paul talks about sanctification in terms of degrees in 2 Corinthians… this work is slow and the result is often invisible, until one day you realize you aren’t the same person you once were. 

Whatever hard, holy, and hidden work you are up to these days, keep on keeping on — good fruit is being produced in and through you and your unseen obedience. Keep going, my friend.