Day 10: You Were Born an Original

Day 10, what can be said? It was fairly uneventful. I must say, work is stressful and when I get home I don't really want to work out but I force myself sometimes and other times it is easy. I hate having to go in the morning and being short handed or having to hear it from the bosses all day about how bad the store is running. I sometimes wonder what people think of me there? I mean, I don't go around telling people about this commitment I have made. In fact, this blog is pretty much the only forum where I talk about a lot the issues on my mind.

I am reading Numbers in the Bible. It is going by too quickly for me to understand what is going on really. I mean there is a lot of, well, numbers. Counting, sorting, planning, it all seems to be sort of methodical and intentional. I don't see much feeling poured into the book. I tend to put too much feeling into my writing. In fact, I write more about my feelings than I do talk about them. I have a feeling and it goes in the blog. That doesn't mean that I am making decisions based on those feelings. I am just having a feeling. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.

So for Day10, I accomplished the following:

No Drinking
No Smoking
P90X Diet and Exercise
No Dates
No Lying


Changes:

I have been losing a significant amount of weight. I am the lightest I have been in five years. I have been loving that aspect of my journey. I am sore every day from working out and I am hungry a lot because I don't want to eat at McDonald's so I just go hungry until I get off work. I need more food to sustain this workout. Fuel the body.


I was thinking about the events that unfold in our lives. The way we view ourselves or the way we long for others to view us and I came to an interesting conclusion. We tend to handle those events in the way we think people want us to. I am saying this because a lot of who we are is a make up of what we want to be, not who we really are. Let me explain, when I come in contact with someone and they have a personality trait that I admire and like, I tend to try to mimic that trait. I have done this for years. Stealing all the good traits and making myself into the person I think the world wants see. But I see now that this is only adding layer and layer of paint until you can't even see what the original was. Once you get down to the original wood finish you can see the true beauty that the paint was hiding. I want that wood finish to shine through. You were born an original, don't die a copy.

Day 4: Learning to play the Background

Day 4 was a huge success. Not in that I did any exercise or felt good about my reading. In fact, I didn't work out. I was still sick and felt terrible all day. But it was a success in the fact that I felt that if I could push through this little hiccup of being sick, then I could push through anything.


I am still reading Exodus. I find it amazing that even though the Israelite's saw God in a pillar of cloud and fire, saw Him send manna every day, saw Him part the Red Sea, and saw Him bring water from a rock they still built a golden calf. It blows my mind that they had the evidence right in front of their faces but still had the nerve to turn their backs on Him. It goes as far as to say that God was going to kill them all and Moses had to talk Him down. That is amazing to me. A God that is all powerful and can wipe us out with a single word can still change his mind because of the advice of a human. That is evidence of a God that truly believes in a relationship. If they can see Him everyday and still not believe then how much more faith does it take to believe in a God that isn't always visible?

So for day 4 I accomplished the following:

No drinking
No smoking
Selected Reading
No lying

Changes:

I have been noticing some changes. I am extremely sore still but I am noticing a much larger drive in motivation. I have been sick and felt terrible all day but I still wanted to work out and read. I didn't work out because I was told that I needed to take it easy or else I would prolong the sickness.

I am hoping for much bigger changes as I go along. I still think about my situation and how bad it is but then I tell myself that I am here for a reason. I am here for this exact reason actually. To recover and find God. There really isn't a better reason. I think that is why I haven't been getting any call backs from the jobs I have been applying to. I think God wants me here for some reason. But as long as I am trusting in Him then I don't have to worry about what that reason is. I am learning to play the background.