“Keep your back straight when you do the kettlebell swing.” Words spoken by Tonia, our instructor at Cross Fit. “You need to get the technique right, else you will hurt your back. Do not bend over backwards.”
I hear what she is saying and even while exercising, it is like the Holy Spirit dumps into my spirit that I need to blog about this. The timing for me sucks as I am sweating, struggling to breathe and in the middle of trying to learn a technique with no hands (or pens) to make notes. BUT I have learnt to make mental notes.
A few days pass and again this past Monday (yesterday to be exact) she says the same thing. Now I start laughing inside and silently (because NO one around me will understand my own personal joke with God and no one will think that the exercises we are doing at that moment is worth a laugh) and I say to Him, OK I will blog about this. So here I am blogging about this.
What God showed me about this, is, when your physical body exercises and you do exercises incorrect, your muscles go into spasm and then usually you cannot walk or perform your usual tasks due to this. You do not need to repeat a movement done incorrectly too many times for this to happen. Nope, just as little as one wrong move can cause you severe pain….and because your body is so wonderfully made to warn you when there is something wrong, we normally do not continue the exercise or just take it calmly for a few days until the spasms are sorted out.
The next question or thing that I felt in my spirit is, that, is this not the same with our emotional person and our spiritual person? More the emotional side (the one where all our emotions are and whether we are happy, or tired and exhausted or elating with joy) I would say than the spiritual side.
You see, God created us Spirit, body and soul (mind). The soul dimension is the one that gets exhausted, not wanting to do something, discouraged, you name any negative thing, in my opinion, it happens there (and of course all the positive things also happen here – I am sure you catch my drift).
When your emotional person bends over backwards (you can admit it – we are all people pleasers in one way or another) you sometimes hurt your “muscles” that you have there. The difference between this person and your physical person is, that, one often struggles to identify when the emotional person is hurt and in pain, needs to rest and NOT repeat the movement that brought the pain on in the first place.
BUT, what do we do? We just go on and on and on. When it is holidays or weekends, one often wonders why you cannot sleep properly or why you feel guilty when you are resting or doing something other than work. I for one am one of those people!
For me personally, 2020, the Pandemic and the hard lockdown that we had, was a back breaker. It was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. That is how I (and I am sure the entire world), experienced it. I am not even going to say “most people” as I often read in articles and hear on videos that people made. No, I am making a statement here that it affected EVERYONE.
Through it all, God was good to me. He is still, to this day, slowly healing my emotional person. From all the bending over backwards that happened over all the years, not only in 2020. I mean, in our line of work, we go the extra mile and do a lot of things out of faith only for it to be thrown back into your face with criticism and in some instances non-payment of our accounts. Not always, but the few times that it does happen (which can be counted on one hand by the way) hurts so badly that you feel like hiding in a cave until the snow storm has passed.
I have had a conversation with God so many times, asking Him WHY do the few people, the ones that are in the minority, hurt us so badly and affect us so badly on an emotional level? I did not get my answer right away, but I did while doing the famous kettlebell swings last week and yesterday.
You see, it is actually very simple. It only takes one or 2 or even 10 incorrect movements to almost paralyze you (not really paralyze you but it affects you so that you cannot function as you usually did) and it is the same on an emotional level. Even if the people who are hurtful to us are the minority, it still hurts and paralyzes us to not be able to go on.
What I have learnt from this whole experience is, if I feel this way about something, then I should listen to my emotional muscles and stop it immediately. It is going to affect me so badly that I will not be able to do anything constructive for the majority of people who are not hurtful….
It is easier said than done, that I will admit. But day-by-day God is busy healing me, teaching me what to stop doing, what to let go of and what to focus my attention on. If He can do it for me, He can surely do it for ANYONE. We only need to learn to TRUST God and the instincts and messages that He instills within our Spirit. After all, the Spiritual person is the one guiding us and if we are not in sync with God then the results may not be as He intended it to be.
Om agteroor te buig
