Faith Venture

Some teachers, not wanting to scare people with the word “discipline”, chose to water the term to spiritual practices. I saw the pool guy yesterday afternoon. We usually meet 2-3 days a week when I’m in the hot tub following my workout, and he’s doing whatever the pool guy does with chemicals and equipment. He asked how I was doing and then said, “You’re quite disciplined.”

When I get the Yoga mat out I am practicing Yoga. When I do it three days a week most weeks, then I have a discipline. Discipline is not a “four-letter-word.” It’s simply a part of my life.

People get on diets to lose weight. Pretty much all diets will cause you to lose weight. That’s not the point. The writers in one of my nutrition and fitness newsletters recently wrote, “The common denominator of all successful diets is how long you can stick to the plan. And that means following a plan that gives you the best chance to stay consistent for many months, and, ideally, years.”

He wrote about some research, “In the study, diet breaks were not associated with faster or more significant fat loss. But that’s only half the story. Even though one group took a one-week break every 2 weeks, they still lost the same amount of fat as those people who dieted without any time off.”

Our nutrition discipline, our physical training discipline, and yes our spiritual disciplines all benefit from a few simple things:

• Do something that you can stick to for the long term
• Don’t be afraid to modify along the way to keep it interesting
• If you need to take a break for travel or life, don’t sweat it
• When the break is over, have that discipline ingrained such that you fall right back into it

People try to meditate like the pictures of the beautiful model sitting in lotus with fingers touching looking over the waves of an ocean. Maybe somebody told them 20 minutes twice a day. Some say you need to light candles and burn incense.

Nonsense. Don’t make it so hard. Find a solid chair. Sit upright with good, but not tense, posture. Take a deep breath. Exhale slowly and relax. Focus on your breath. Inhale. Exhale. If thoughts come, heck when thoughts come, don’t worry or force them out. Just let them come and go. You have 2 minutes. That’s a great start. Maybe next week 5 minutes is easy. Most of us just can’t sit still. That takes practice. After a couple of weeks, the practice becomes a discipline. Ha! You have sneaked up on a spiritual discipline. Hopefully one that continues for the long haul.

Sometimes I allow other people to influence my behavior. It’s not intentional. It just happens. Like yesterday when I was unloading the dishwasher. My wife decided to help. She wants to get it done. I unconsciously speed up. I grabbed a coffee mug from one of her favorite sets. It slipped from my fingers. Dropped onto another mug. In an instant what had been one useable object was three pieces of trash.

Once I rushed through everything. And I made mistakes. I overlooked part of the equation or one silly word in the story problem.

Slow is actually fast. And better. A slight reduction in hurry and my wife would have a full set of six coffee mugs in the set instead of five.

A slight reduction in reading speed and I would have more perfect scores on my Duolingo language lessons. A slight reduction in learning new chords on the guitar would result in deeper understanding of the nuances of the chord.

Not rushing through meditation and prayer—priceless.

Pausing to ponder one of Jesus’ stories—deeper understanding.

Slowing down to actually listen to those I’m with—better relations.

Slower can be faster and with more quality.