So I recently joined a new gym. I had been going to the same gym I went to in high school as a part of a family plan with my parents, but apparently you can't be on a family plan as a child past the age of 24. So that means A.) I must officially be an adult and 2.) I decided to look for a cheaper option and settled on L.A. Fitness. It's funny. I didn't want to pay the price of my old gym, but now I'm paying more anyway because I decided to start doing personal training. I get one 30-minute session a week and I love it because it helps me get better, but it's also super humbling. As in, if I weren't so secure, it might even feel humiliating.
Now, don't get the idea that these feelings have anything to do with L.A. Fitness or the trainers at my local gym — just the opposite. It's humbling because even though I know it's great for me and I'm growing, it also reveals a lot of weaknesses I didn't even know I had.
I'm not a typical girly-girl and I've played sports my whole life, so I'd like to think I'm not a beginner when it comes to training. I even took weight training in high school for a year.
NOPE.
I feel like I've never lifted a weight before in my life. I knew my back was weak because because it runs in the family. I knew that my knees were a little weak from the runners knee I got in high school. But I didn't know how weak my back and my knees are. Or that my ankles are weak. I sprained one before my senior year of high school, but it hasn't really bothered me since. I feel like an idiot knowing I have weak ankles, like a stereotypical damsel in distress who doesn't belong in the gym.
SAVE ME, WONDERBOY!
But really. WEAK ANKLES IS A THING AND I HAVE IT.
The point is, in order to get better, I need to keep going to the gym and to my personal training session every week. And it's not like I can pretend I don't need to improve while I'm there. I can't act like I've got everything together because I won't get better if I do. And even if I tried, it wouldn't work. My trainer can tell just by looking at me doing an exercise what parts of my body are weak. He asks me about my eating habits and calls me out on my bad form.
And you know what? IT'S GREAT and I wish it were this easy to have accountability in my spiritual life. I wish that once a week, I could show up at Starbuck and a friend could just look at me and say, "Your prayer life is really weak. We need to strengthen that up. Here, let's do some prayer curls," or "I can see that you haven't been working on your tithing lately."
But it's not that simple. It's easier to disguise your spiritual and emotional weaknesses, and it's often harder for our friends and families to call us out on them. But it's what we so desperately need, and we have to be intentional to cultivate it. Just like I'm not going to get healthier physically on accident, I'm not going to grow spiritually without putting in the work and allowing someone to hold me accountable.
How do you guys let yourselves be vulnerable and held accountable? Is it taking it too far to wear a sign around my neck that says, "Please don't accept my crap answers—make me be honest"?
