Bangor Chronicles: Swimming

My mother and I took adult swimming lessons for five weeks. It was a lot of fun. I learned how how to the breaststroke and mastered my freestyle and backstroke. My breaststroke is a work of a progress but it is correct. Just need to build up my endurance.

One thing I learned is that with swimming, muscle memory is hard to accomplish but is very important. It is hard to change something you have doing different from what the stroke calls for. Knowing what you are supposed to do and having the timing is hard.

When we think about life, we need a form of muscle training. We need to remember the right path to go and not depart from it. More and more, sin is becoming normalized. We rationalize our sins so we can keep on doing what we are doing. We want to continue doing what we are doing and because sin makes us feel guilty, we lighten it up to make us not feel guilty.

Where does being complacent and not remembering the things we are supposed to get us? NO WHERE! When we swim the wrong way, we are going to continue to swim the wrong way. The longer we swim the wrong way, the harder it is to learn a better way to swim- the right way.

Just like our muscles need to be trained to swim the right way- our heart and our minds need to learn to live the right way. How do we train our hearts and minds to go the way it should go? Some of it is basic common sense- going to church and praying. DISCLAIMER: I do not judge anyone who does not go to church and still share in the Christian faith. I believe it is more important to live out our faith and living for God then it is going Church  every Sunday. Church is only a building. Living it out is so much more important. Knowing where you are going is more important. Having friends to help retrain your muscles is important. It is important to train your mind using a part of Philippians 4 that tells us where we are suppose to focus.

Philippians 4:8 And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.

To be completely honest and transparent, I really struggle with this and I am really working on it. I have been negative about a lot of different things. I have become cynical about God. I have been seeing things through a worldly lens and have seeing things as coincidence instead of something that had been orchestrated by God.

We got to learn to swim the right way. We need to approach live the right way. We need to see sin as what it really is and not rationalize it and make excuses.  We need to train our minds so we can in the righteousness that we called to.