Two quotes from my previous post:
1. "If getting enough exercise to meet your own adult body's needs never becomes a high priority, you will rarely if ever do it."
2. "With getting more exercise, one must take MORE for oneself.This is a barrier for a lot of us."
It's a barrier because it can seem that to place your own physical health at a high priority is an indulgence, rather than a sacrifice. And therefore it seems like something Christian charity urges us to give up, rather than something to take on. I'd like to argue that for most of us, it is not an indulgence, it is a sacrifice.
But the nature of the sacrifice is different depending on why you might see it as a self-indulgence. I want to knock down the easy ones first. All you have to do is figure out which of these "self-indulgences" matches the one in your own head.
Imaginary self-indulgence 1. Keeping it all together (or appearing to) without asking for help from other people is your high priority. You should be able to do everything yourself! If you have to ask for help to get your workout---help from an expert, help from your spouse, help from a friend to watch your kids---that would be admitting you can't take care of yourself (let alone your family) without help, and you can't bear to admit that.
Sacrifice: Bite the bullet and ask for the help you need. If it feels yucky to ask, then it's probably all the more important that you do it. If you pride yourself on self-reliance, the cure is humility.
Imaginary self-indulgence 2. The priority you won't displace is all the commitments you've made. Your schedule is tight: volunteer work, the kids' piano lessons and science classes, maybe your job or your blogging. If it turns out that the time you take for exercising conflicts with one of these things, you know you'll have to cancel the workout. People are depending on you.
Sacrifice: More humility, and some thankfulness for all the wonderful opportunities you have ---including your good health and the opportunity to take care of it. There will be other volunteers. The world will go on if you drop out of some of this stuff. Your kids' future will not be compromised if they have to miss a lesson or go for a time without extra enrichment classes. (Think of the many kids whose parents can't afford those things. Are their parents bad parents?) Most of the time, someone else will step in to fill the need. And people will understand if you have to cut back on your schedule and your family's schedule to take care of your health.
(And if they don't, they can go take a flying you know what.)
Imaginary self-indulgence 3. This one counts double. The truth is, you don't really want to exercise. It's hard, it's not as much fun as the other things you want to do, or you're afraid to start for any number of reasons---will people laugh at you, will you give up and be disappointed in yourself, will you fail? But you have convinced yourself that you don't want to do it because it would take you away from your family. It's a convenient excuse with plausible deniability! This way, (a) you don't have to change, and (b) you get to feel like a selfless person. Maybe even a bit of self-pity.
Sacrifice: Here the necessary sacrifice is to stop this insidious, comfortable lie. You aren't as selfless as you think. You're using your family or your other commitments as an excuse to keep from doing something difficult. There's at least two or three things wrong with this attitude, including possibly sloth for real. Repent and turn back to the truth. Even if the truth hurts.
Oh, and I've got a really great idea for your penance. Drop and give me twenty!
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But what if none of those describe you? What if... you really are a generous person who really struggles with taking resources for yourself --- for real? What if you can think of lots of really good reasons why it might really be a self-indulgence to place your exercise at the highest priority? What if you can't tell your needs from your self-centered wants? Scrupulosity's a bitch, isn't it? I'm going to try to unpack that kind of discernment in the next post.
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