Monthly Archives: April 2020

Working it out in you(r body).

For the longest time I’ve been trying to like exercise. I remember a moment, almost 20 years ago, when I was out for a jog (at that pace, I don’t think it merited the term “run”), and I was struck with a joyous realisation that I was finally being someone who I wanted to be. But I was getting married later that summer, so the wedding-dress motivation was strong.

Fast-forward through a couple of half-marathons and four babies and I am still working at identifying as a person who runs. I don’t do it for the wedding dress, or any dress, any more. I do it for the sanity.

I’m learning more and more that I have to work out my feelings in my body, that I need to deal with stress in my body, and more generally that I just need to be a person in my body – and not a person with a body.

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Go slow

We used to joke that one of our daughters had only one speed in the morning: SLOTH. It was painful to watch as she struggled out of bed, dawdled her way through breakfast and the morning jobs, and then scrabbled to pull it all together as we headed out the door to school. No matter if she was first up, she was always the last to be ready to leave. It used to drive me nuts when we were in a hurry to go somewhere.

But these days, courtesy of the COVID-19 lockdown, we’re not in a hurry, and we’re not going anywhere.

I’ve recently finished John Mark Comer’s book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, which is all about “how to stay emotionally healthy and spiritually alive in the chaos of the modern world” (find the book here, or listen to his teaching on the topic here). And it was like a prescription from heaven for my heart.

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