Our Faith Check-Up! Don't Delay!

What a beautiful fall day it was as I was driving to my Physical Therapy appointment! Thankfully, it was a previously scheduled appointment for maintenance, but I really needed the expertise of my therapist right then! I had experienced just under 3 weeks of numb-free and pain-free days from this sciatic pain. Then a recent nighttime illness caused me to lay around the next day and rest, meaning no exercise. That was the end of the numb-free and pain-free time!

Prior to this set back, I had been in a wonderful pattern of doing my sciatica exercises 2-3 times per day and strength training at the YMCA each day. This appeared to be maintaining me, and I was ecstatic! Don’t we all know what a “Hallelujah” it is when pain leaves us!

As I was driving home after my appointment, God showed me how the therapy of manipulation on my muscles and the need for the manipulations demonstrated the need for the maintenance & manipulation of my faith. As I have said before, these God-messages are for me first!

Even though I have been performing different exercises daily, my muscles were not functioning properly. When I saw the pictures of the muscles in my buttocks, I was amazed at how many different-sized muscles there were. Some were next to others, and some were underneath others. They were packed tightly together with a distinct function for each one. What a grand design of God!

Once my PT worked on me for 40 minutes, he had “worked out the kinks”, and I was walking correctly. On the way home, God showed me that my faith can be exactly like these muscles. I think I am “exercising” them by the daily readings/prayers, but how deep does this faith-based “exercise” program take me? How likely am I to slowly drift away from God and not even know it?

I thought my body was doing really well and almost cancelled the appointment. However, I didn’t know what was happening underneath my skin, and indeed, muscles had moved out of their correct position without me knowing/feeling it. It took a lot of physical work to get those muscles back in place!

Now think about our faith. Do we know what is happening underneath in the deeper levels of our faith? We can’t see them, and we may think we are doing well with our communications with God as well as our daily faith rituals. But are we?

What are you doing daily to exercise your faith? Are you in daily prayer/mediation, devotionals, reading/studying scripture. Are you challenging yourself to go deeper in your faith? Are you following the same pattern of study, which is comfortable for you? Are you surrounding yourselves with godly people who will help to strengthen our faith? What would a maintenance check look like? Believe me, I am asking myself these questions too!

I am reading the 40-day devotional book titled “Draw the Circle” by Mark Batterson (Zondervan, 2012). On Day 29, he writes:

It’s easy to fall into a prayer rut. We repeat all the prayer cliches we know, followed by an amen! We need to pray a new prayer. We need a new vocabulary, a new methodology.

The next time you pray, try a new posture or a new time slot. If you typically verbalize your prayers, try writing them out. If you kneel while praying, try a prayer walk. Do something different. Get out of your regular routine, and pray a new prayer to the Lord.

If you want God to do something new, you cannot keep doing the same old thing.

I believe that God is telling us to get a maintenance check on our faith on a regular basis. I imagine that this would look different for each of us. It’s important to ask the questions. Are we challenging ourselves to go beyond the routine maintenance of our faith? Are we asking God to challenge us in this journey?

May we always be mindful about conducting our faith checks to be sure that all avenues of study are functioning properly, and our faith-based exercise program is constantly challenging us!!

Thanks for stopping by,

Rachel