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Monday, March 29, 2010

Day 23: Think about others

The Day 23 chapter sets out the first thing you can do to promote your spiritual growth and become like Jesus - think about others.  Before getting to this, however, it makes a few other points along the way.

Rick Warren writes "It takes an intentional commitment.  You must want to grow, decide to grow, make an effort to grow, and persist in growing."  I like these words because a lot of people these days talk about committment like its an emotion akin to desire or ambition.  Along with various other definitions (eg perpetrate a crime), the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines commit as "bind oneself to (a course)".  In other words - you just keep turning up - it doesn't matter whether you want to or not. 

In January 2007, I made a commitment to attend "boot camp" exercise training twice a week for six weeks at 6.15am.  I was never one for exercising and no-one who knows me would mistake me for a morning person, so I didn't really think I would last six weeks. However, I ended up going for over two years, increasing my attendance to three times a week, doing additional exercise by myself including a 10km fun run, and only gave up when I was six weeks pregnant.   

I started going to boot camp because I wanted to lose weight, I didn't lose weight and I didn't really care because I experienced a range of other benefits - I got stronger, I had more energy, I had better balance, I developed more self discipline because I realised that having that internal argument with yourself about whether or not to do something you don't want to do is usually far worse than just getting on with it, I developed a louder voice which made people listen to me more (true - it was bizarre), I made friends with people at boot camp and people at work who liked to exercise, on days when I go up to exercise I felt like I had achieved something for the day and all before the time that I would have got up on the days when I didn't exercise.

The point I am trying to make here, in a very long winded way, is that when you decide to start doing something good and keep doing it, you will reap a whole host of rewards that you cannot foresee when you start.

Rick Warren writes that we should think of others instead of ourselves because it is what Jesus did.  He doesn't give any other reasons, even though I'm sure people would be quick to shower you with cliches about this if you asked.  I think commiting to this will reveal a whole host of benefits that I might make the subject of the blog once I finish reading The Purpose Driven Life.

2 comments:

  1. Think I might need to go back and read my posts again. There are probably about 50 things I said I was going to blog on next.

    ReplyDelete