While Maggie was in the hospital, I skipped jogging eight times in a week and a half. After that, especially with the cold air and the cloudy & foggy days, it is SO hard to make myself go out and jog.
It's like I have failed if I skip exercise just one day. One transgression seems to give me "permission" to skip again, since I've already failed. The same thing happens with washing dishes, or prayers, or dusting, or the kids' math. Something similar happens with horizontal surfaces after the living room is cleaned. The end table and the coffee table and the buffet will stay clean for a while ... until one person puts one item there, and then it's like everybody has permission to leave mugs and socks and books and pencils and drawings on that particular horizontal surface.
It seems like maybe I'm beginning to learn that a person can keep starting over, and that one failure does not mean that we will be forever consigned to ditching family prayers or jogging or vacuuming or whatever. There's also the benefit of harnessing that obsessive-compulsive tendency. If I know that allowing myself to skip jogging today means that I will be giving myself an excuse to skip jogging every day for the rest of the week, that gives me more incentive to discipline the flesh and do what needs to be done NOW.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
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Isn't God great?! We get a 'clean slate' every day when the sun comes up each morning. No matter how much we failed or how bad a day, the day always comes to an end and we get a new chance to 'get it right' with each new sunrise! Of course, we still rely on God. Like Zig Ziglar likes to say: "I clearly understand that failure is an event, not a person; that yesterday really did end last night; and that success isn't final and failure isn't fatal because I only fail if I quit."
ReplyDeleteHi Susan. This is just a test post. Wanted to see if my password is working to post comments. You can delete this if you like.
ReplyDeleteJonathan