Healthy Habits.

It felt good to stretch my legs today.
Mostly because they are getting a little soft.  I can partly blame my flabby thighs on my Valentine.  He’s great with numbers.  Incredibly organized.  A bit ‘by the book’ sometimes, a little too ‘formulaic' for my taste, but you have to take the good with the bad eh?  We’ve been spending a lot of time together and he requires a lot of sedentary focused attention and well, if I ever become Mrs. Microsoft Excel, I had better find a clothing line flattering to pear shapes.

But this got me to thinking [the part about stretching my legs-not about my beau excel]  about habits. ‘Healthy' versus ‘Unhealthy'. From experience, I can’t have mostly healthy habits and squeak a few junk food type habits in, because the latter is a contagious disease.  Allow me to use two examples that show the snowball effect and the compound effect.

Example one:
On the food note, I eat pretty healthy according to most standards.  But I’ve been healthier.  This summer I started experimenting with baking more gluten free things.  Now, I can’t get enough chewy sugar laden treats. I'll take a peanut butter cookie over a mango these days. O, the horror!

Example two:
I taught myself to sleep on my back in high school because I heard it was better for your back. It took a long while, but I’ve been a back sleeper ever since.  Well, until I moved home. Maybe the sweets are to blame, but I started sleeping on my side again.  Now my back hurts consistently.  Even as I type this I am leaning to the left with my left shoulder dropping, my head cocked to the right and my legs crossed.  It’s a recipe for scoliosis!

These ridiculous examples to say, that while sucking cold winter air, I noticed a bigger issue.

When I’m doing healthy things, unhealthy things are wholly unappetizing.  When I’m doing unhealthy things, I only have 'eyes' for those dirty rascals. [Sorry Excel.] I know what I should do, and yet I don’t do it.  Because I’m being led astray by white sugar and sleeping in the fetal position.

Is this sounding slightly familiar to anyone else?

“For I do not understand my own actions.  For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”
“For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.  For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep doing.”  -Paul, Romans 7

He says that when he works up the urge for something good, “evil lies close at hand.” [Evil looks surprisingly like dairy free no-bake cookies sometimes btw.] Can I get an amen?

"Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles and let us RUN with PERSEVERANCE the race marked out for us.” -Hebrews 12:1

Running is a a habit that requires perseverance. It takes awhile to establish, speaking from experience.
This verse was running through my head too while running:

“Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” -Romans 12

I know I’ve been transformed.  But dang, it seems I have a lot of transforming left to do!  And how quickly I feel like I’ve lost a handle on my transformation and slip into spoonfuls of jif peanut butter, pride and bitterness with a side of couch potato.  I’ve heard a rumor that it takes 30 days to develop a habit.  I’m beginning to think that rumor is total bull.

I know I have to show a little perseverance. Show a little discipline.  Take an honest inventory. Root out those unhealthy habits. Fill the gaps with real good ones. Throw off the sin that so easily gets me all tangled up.  And it's not going to be easy.  But the grass really is greener on the other side.  I know this because I've frolicked in it from time to time.  So be gone you parasitic habits! I'm trading you in for better ones!

Oh, and I almost forgot something.  For those times when the evil close at hand is absolutely relentless...
The good news.

“Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

[drumroll please...]

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” -Paul, Romans 7

YES!  Saved by the Christ, yet again.  THANKS BE TO GOD.  For if it were just up to me, we’d be in trouble.  Probably drown in chocolate sauce and impatience or something equally terrible.