Good Days and Bad Days

This is a post in the continuing series about what the church (and all of us) can learn from CrossFit.

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I’ve been seriously working to strengthen my upper body, particulary my supposedly powerful back muscles, so I can get my first unassisted, strict pull up.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never really been able to do a pull up – not even as a kid who used to hang off the monkey bars for hours on end every day. But I want one now – because who knows when I’ll need to pull myself up from a dead hang (and it’s badass to be able to do one, especially as a woman). I’ve been making steady gains and feel like I can have it with a couple more months work. I’ve been slowly decreasing the angle of my ring rows and working on a few flexed arm hangs combined with negative deficits (those are HARD). It’s taking a while, but I’ll get there.

Because of all this work I’ve put in, I was surprised when, at a workout last week, I was struggling to pull myself up with a blue band assisting me. I’ve done plenty of blue banded strict pull ups for strength. I’ve even progressed to the red band a couple of times which is less helpful than the blue (in a good way).

But there I was, with the blue band holding me to the bar and taunting me because I couldn’t do more than one or two at a time.

Which reminded me that there are good days and bad days at the gym.

That’s how it goes.

Not all days will be good.

Who knows – maybe I’d put in too much work and my shoulders didn’t want to cooperate that day.

Or didn’t eat enough. Or well enough. So my muscles didn’t have the glucose stores they needed to pull me up that day.

Or I didn’t sleep well the night before and my body was struggling to keep my upright, let alone pull myself up to a bar.

There are a million different possible reasons why I was having a bad day at the gym.

The thing to remember is that I have good days too.

Like when I PR’d (personal record for those not up with the workout slang) a deadlift at 215 pounds. The most I’d ever lifted. EVER.

Or when I’ve flown through a workout, beating most of the people in the box who usually finish well before I do.

Good days happen too.

But they can’t all be good.

Just like life.

We want to have good days, but the bad ones will come too.

Which is also true of our faith.

There will be days when we sense God’s nearness – when we have great hope and faith for the world and are seemingly able to put our faith into action.

But there will also be days when we’d rather binge eat ice cream and read trashy novels on a Sunday morning because we just can’t bear the idea of going to church and confronting our brokenness.

The thing to remember on those bad days is that there will be good days too. To make them happen, sometimes that means we’ll need to take better care of ourselves, pray a bit more, immerse ourselves in God’s word to remind ourselves of the promise, and maybe even a “fake it until you make it” mentality. But sometimes those good days will just sneak in there.

There will be good days and bad days. That’s just how it is – the trick is remembering there will be good days on a bad day.

 

Image: Jeramey Jannene (creative commons license)

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