Day 2
Rhythms. Not Numbers (Matthew 6:33)
Last July, while enjoying our summer vacation, I invested a morning at a coffeeshop up in the Pinecrest Lake Mountains. It was a quaint little place with Christian owners who treated me like a visiting King. My bible and laptop were open. My noise cancelling headphones were filled with some enriching gospel music. And they served made to order crepes. Yeah, I was happy as a tick on a hound.
But while in earnest prayer, I heard the Lord say to me, “Will you hike to the cross every week for me?” Now I need to say something here. I am NOT a hiker or a camper. We didn’t hike or camp growing up. It just wasn’t us. Indeed, I’m an avid indoorsman. If nothing else, I’m an “ANTIHIKER!” I’m an “ANTI-CAMPER!” I just never got it ya know? I remember a talkshow host, who disdains hiking and camping as much as I do say, “I just don’t understand going outside to pretend to be homeless.” Sadly I resonate with the statement. So imagine my shock and awe when I felt the Lord ask me to go hiking—once a week.
If you live around the Coachella Valley like I do you know the famous Palm Desert hike to the cross. It’s about 1.2 miles of pure elevation and beauty. There’s a huge cross at the peak where plausibly hundreds of thousands have been across the decades. And here I am returning home in AUGUST (it’s a desert ya know) and God said, “Go hike.” Thankfully one of my brothers in my discipleship group said he’d join me upon sharing what God has commissioned me to do with the rest of the group. I’m off on Mondays. So there he and I were. Every Monday. Hiking. In the heat. The first time I almost died I think. Panting. Sweating. Complaining. But I knew God asked me to do this. What started out as a 55 minute experiment in torture has now become, months later, a 28 minute (yes I record my best times) exercise with one of my closest brothers in Christ.
We talk Jesus all the way up. We talk Jesus all the way down. And God has used this sacred discipline to set the Sabbath day in my heart, strengthen my relationship with a brother I am discipling, and set my heart ablaze for ministry in the coming season.
I’d begun the Fall with an earnest desire to get healthy and lose some weight. The pounds were falling off and I found myself becoming more influenced by the numbers on the scale as opposed to the virtue of being healthy. So one Monday my buddy and I are on the mountain and, I guess for too long, I’d been talking too intently about the number on the scale. You see I hadn’t lost any weight that week and couldn’t understand why. I was working out. Eating right. The whole nine. Why no results? So I’m just complaining I guess and that’s when my friend stops on the mountain, looks at me and says, “Remember. It’s about rhythms. Not numbers.” He goes on to say, “Bro what matters is that you’re doing the right things consistently. And as long as you remain faithful to that it doesn’t matter what the scale says. That part will come too.”
That was a game changer. Because it broke my addiction to the readout on the scale. And refastened my contentment to what Jesus thinks about me and what I think about myself as opposed to some arbitrary number that, too often, doesn’t really tell the whole story.
Fasting is a wonderful way to help you detach your heart from the proverbial “numbers on the scale” that the world offers us. Fasting helps us reattach our heart to those sacred rhythms of prayer, scripture, meditation. THIS is where we find ourselves! Not with what ‘numbers’ the world throws at us. And I heard Jesus say in Matthew 6 that he longs for his people to seek first God’s Kingdom (God’s rhythms and God’s way of doing things) trusting that all the other things of life will be added unto us.
Stay in Rhythm. Not numbers.
Love y’all
Ricky