The Daily Grind & Physical Margin
Sycamore Creek Church
October 14, 2012
Tom Arthur
Genesis 1:26-27

Note: This series is informed by Richard Swenon’s book Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives.

Peace, Friends!

How many of you experience the daily grind?  The slow wear and tear on our emotions, bodies, time, and money?  I suspect that just about every one does.  It’s simply part of living, like having the tread on your tires wear down.  The opposite of the daily grind is margin.

Grind = fatigue, Margin = energy
Grind = red ink, Margin = black ink
Grind = hurry, Marin = calm
Grind = anxiety, Margin = peace
Grind = culture, Margin = counter culture
Grind = stressed, depressed, and exhausted, Marin = calm, content, and charged-up
Grind = progress of accumulation, Margin = progress of virtue
Grind = burnout, Margin = mission
Grind = disease of our millennium, Margin = is its cure.

Today we’re continuing a series exploring the daily grind and how to let God rebuild the physical margin in our lives.  You may not believe me but I struggle with the physical grind of staying healthy.  Most of the men in my family overweight and diabetic, and I love candy and have no discipline!  Put a jar of bag of candy in front of me and I’ll eat the whole thing in one setting.  And when do I have time to exercise?  At my last doctors appointment I spent a good amount of time with Dr. Shoemaker brainstorming with me how to make sure I’m exercising.  I was in a car accident two years ago and still suffer some back pain.  Lately I’ve been finding myself working later and later which is cutting into my sleep.  I struggle with keeping physical margin in my life.  We all do.

Do you know that “more die in the United States of too much food than too little” (Galbraith quoted in Swanson, 97).  The average American gets 2.5 hours less sleep per night than 100 years ago (Swanson, 96).  50% of all deaths are related to lifestyle choices (Swanson, 96).  Most of us have jobs that are mostly sedentary.  We sit at computers and rarely get up and walk around.

Today we’re going to explore why we should take care of our bodies and then we’re going to look at some practical steps for rebuilding physical margin amidst the daily grind.

God and Our Bodies
At the very beginning of the bible, the Genesis if you will, we receive some motivation for taking care of our bodies.  We read:

Genesis 1:26-27 NRSV
Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image (tselem), according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

The word tselem, translated here “image” three different times, is a very unique word.  While it is usually translated “image” in the creation story, elsewhere it is translated “idol” as in Ezekiel: “They were proud of their gold jewelry and used it to make vile and detestable idols (tselem)” (7:20 NLT).

That’s odd, isn’t it?  We are created in God’s idol?  Here’s how I understand the story of creation: The creation story is the story of God creating God’s very own temple.  Once the physical structure of any temple is built, what’s the last thing that needs to be placed in the temple?  An idol!  Thus, the last thing that God creates is the “idol” that will represent God in the temple of creation.  We are the “idols” or representation of God in creation!  (Maybe that’s why we have such a hard time not idolizing and worshiping each other.  Maybe that’s why we get so caught up in fame and celebrity.)  But what does it say about God if his idols are out of shape, overweight, and constantly tired?

Main Point
Here’s the main point of this message: We worship God by taking care of our bodies.  We represent God well in God’s temple when we pay attention to the bodies that God created us with to be God’s “idol” in creation, God’s temple.  When we ignore our bodies and don’t take care of them, we disrespect the image of God in which we were made.

This doesn’t mean that our bodies must be perfect.  There is no such thing.  In fact, if we continue to read the creation story, we will read about “the fall” from this perfect image.  Humanity, along with its bodies, gets distorted and broken.

Worshiping God with our bodies also doesn’t mean that we have to buy into the images that our culture presents us as the ideal body.  Worshiping God with our bodies doesn’t mean we need six pack abs, sexy buns, no wrinkles, no gray hair, and are all able to run a marathon.  But we worship God with our bodies when they are healthy and able to fully participate in building God’s kingdom.  This means fully alive to love and serve God and others.  Has the daily grind so worn you down that you don’t have the physical margin to be fully alive, to fully love and serve God and others?  If so, here are some suggestions for how to rebuild physical margin.

Rebuild Emotional Margin
Rebuild physical margin by first rebuilding emotional margin.  Why is this important?  Because making any kind of hard change in your life is like getting a rider to direct an elephant down a path.  The rider is the intellect.  The elephant is the emotions.  The path is how easy it is for the elephant to go where the rider wants it to go.  If you only focus on head knowledge, then the rider will soon get tired.  To change, you have to motivate the elephant, the emotions.  So how is your emotional margin?  If you missed last week, here’s a brief summary: restore emotional margin by rebuilding hope.  Rebuild hope by making space in your life for friends, fun, and faith.  If you rebuild hope, you’ll have the emotional margin to motivate the elephant down the path to rebuilding physical margin.

Besides directly motivating the elephant, you can also make the path as easy as possible to go down.  So here are some suggestions for clearing the path forward.

Recreate
When it comes to our bodies we need to recreate.  Your elementary school had it right.  We all need a recess when we can go out on the playground and run around.  To do this well, we have to focus on our muscles, our heart, and our tendons.  Your muscles need both strength and endurance.  Strength is built by lifting heavier weight with fewer reps.  Endurance is built by lifting lighter weights with more reps.  I find that one of the easiest ways for me to do this kind of work is to pair it with something else.  I enjoy muscle exercise more when I’m watching something while I’m exercising.  I tend to knock out three birds by watching sermons.  That way I get the entertainment of watching something, I get the muscular exercise, and I get the spiritual training as well.  I also think that doing this kind of thing is much easier done in community with others.  A friend who you exercise with helps keep you motivated and accountable, especially if one of you picks the other up on the way to exercising.  Or consider something like our upcoming reCRASH event on October 20^th.  The men in our church are meeting to rake yards.  There you go, exercise and community all in one!

Recreation also needs to include exercising the heart.  We need aerobic exercise 3-4x a week.  If you struggle with your weight and aerobic exercise seems daunting, consider water aerobics.  Micah, my son and I, would go to open tot swim time at the Holt Jr. High pool twice a week during the summer.  During the open tot swim time, there was also a water aerobics class.  This is seriously low impact aerobic exercise.  But you really don’t need a lot of equipment to make this happen.  Walking can be aerobic exercise.  We all need about 7000-10,000 steps each day to get good aerobic exercise.  I’ve recently been converted to carrying a pedometer on me each day.  By measuring the actual number of steps I’ve taken, I find myself motivated to make sure I get in enough steps.  If I get home and I’ve got a half hour of free time and notice I’ve only taken 3000 steps for the day, do you think I’m more likely to surf the internet or go for a walk?  Right.  Go for a walk.  If I didn’t have the pedometer on me, I wouldn’t have that motivation.  Surfing the internet would win every time.

Another easy way to walk is to turn regular meetings you have into walking meetings.  I realized recently that every week our staff meets to pray.  We usually sit in a rather boring office (my office!) and talk and pray.  But after reading about this suggestion, I decided to turn our prayer meetings into walking prayer meetings.  We happen to have the entrance to the River Walk Trail just across the street from the office.  So every week our staff walks and prays together for about forty-five minutes.

Once again, doing this kind of thing in community is ideal.  This past summer a small group was formed in our church called Run for God.  Those in the group studied the Bible together and then trained for either walking or running a 5K.  I’m not sure where the discussion is at for holding this small group again, but anyone could create something like this and make it happen.

An often neglected aspect of recreation is exercising not only the muscles and the heart but also the tendons.  How flexible are you?  I asked a friend of mine in her nineties what her secret was to her amazing health.  She said that it was this: she ate mostly raw veggies and she stretched every day.  How often do you stretch?

To rebuild physical margin we need to recreate.  But we also need to eat right.

Eat Right
Friends, I have a covenant with my pants.  I tell them that I will never leave them nor forsake them.  When they get too tight, rather than buying newer bigger pants, I lose weight.  I use the discomfort of my tight pants to motivate me to lose weight.  This way I lose weight before it becomes a serious health problem.  I have had to lose anywhere from five to fifteen pounds about six or seven times in my adult life.  That means that if I hadn’t lost that weight, I’d currently be over two-hundred pounds.  I found an app on my phone that creates a picture of me overweight (Fat Booth).  The image is very motivating to help me continue to stay at a healthy weight.

Here’s the unfortunate truth that all of us need to hear: we need to eat fewer calories.  Every extra pound equals 3500 calories, which in turn equals 20 hours of slow walking.  One of the easiest ways to eat fewer calories is to cut out all the sugary drinks that you drink, including the pop.  I read an article recently in the Lansing State Journal that said that “a huge, decades-long study involving more than 33,000 Americans has yielded the first clear proof that drinking sugary beverages interacts with genes that affect weight, amplifying a person’s risk of obesity beyond what it would be from heredity alone.”  The best thing to drink is water, but if you must, drink diet sodas.

Another simple thing to do is eat smaller portions.  Eat the same food you usually eat but just eat less of it.  Split the meal between two of you or between two meals.  A somewhat radical approach to this would be to get rid of all your dinner plates and eat only off of smaller plates.  Studies have shown that people eat less when they have smaller plates.

Or consider this rather radical idea for eating: eat at the table.  When you eat standing at the counter or in front of the TV or at your computer, you eat more.  But when you sit down for an actual meal at your dinner table, you eat less.

One thing that helps me significantly is to keep track of what I eat.  There are several free apps on your phone that will help you do it.  I personally use Weight Watchers online food diary.  I find it easy to use and I find the money I spend on it motivating to keep using it.

One last tip on food: eat more natural and less processed food.  A recent article I read in Psychology Today made a very interesting point.  Women today weigh 20 pounds more than they did forty years ago.  The reason for this, the article argued, was because women need a certain amount of good-fat to form the brain of an infant (interestingly enough, this good fat is stored in the thighs).  Our current food sources have less of this kind of good fat so women have to eat more to get the same amount.  Thus, because of the kind of processed and grain-fed food we’re eating, women put on more pounds to be able to effectively reproduce.  To add insult to injury, the article pointed out that women regularly think that men find skinnier women, like runway models, more attractive when in reality, the average woman is closer to the ideal of the average man.  Women think men want a stick-figure model.  But really women are closer to men’s ideals than they realize.

Rebuild physical margin in your life by eating right.

Rest
Lastly, rebuild physical margin in your life by getting enough rest.  Most of us need seven to eight hours of sleep to rejuvenate our bodies and minds.  I mentioned earlier that I was beginning to work later and later into the night.  I was finding myself going to bed later and later.  This was creating other problems for me the next morning.  At our most recent men’s retreat, CRASH, I confessed this to the men in my small group and one of the guys in my small group committed to calling me occasionally to make sure that I was getting enough sleep.  I decided that I was going to quit at 10PM whether I was done or not.  I wake up around 5:30AM so getting to bed between 10 and 10:30PM each night ensures that I get at least seven hours of sleep each night.

If you have a hard time sleeping try these tips:

1. Go to bed and get up at the same time.  Your body likes predictable rhythms.
2. Wind down for an hour before bed.  Don’t forget that your mind needs some time to calm down before your body will fall asleep.
3. Don’t eat a big meal 2 hours before bed.
4. Limit caffeine in the evening (and afternoon).  Because I drink mostly water (the best drink there is), if I drink something caffeinated in the evening, it is sure to mean a bad night of sleep.
5. Don’t stay in bed awake.  If you’re laying in bed awake then get up and read, pray, or  walk.  Train your body to associate your bed with sleep rather than with laying awake in bed.
6. Keep a notebook by your bed to get things out of your head that keep you awake.
7. Exercise during the day.  I’m learning that toddlers sleep best when they’ve had an active day.  Adults are no different.  Make yourself tired by exercising.

A Community of Physical Margin
If margin is like the tread on your tires, it slowly wears down, what would it be like if our church was a retread factory, that helped people put margin back in their lives?  I already see it happening.  Small Groups are holding one another accountable to recreation, eating right, and rest.  In fact, today we’ve got a Group LINK today where you can sign up to visit and try out some small groups in our church.  Or join my Pizza with the Pastor after worship every Sunday at Leo’s Lodge (two or three pieces of vegetable pizza are a very healthy meal!).  Get in a small group and begin to rebuild physical margin!

At SCC I’ve seen people lose and keep off dozens of pounds (and counting!); reverse diabetes; get off prescription medications; stop smoking or working toward it; give up pot; begin walking, running, or biking; and run a 5K, half-marathon, or marathon.  We rebuild physical margin so that we can work better, run better, feel better, heal better, live better and serve better.  And all that adds up to loving better and worshiping God better!

Prayer
God, we are your “idols” in your temple of creation.  Help us to care for these bodies so that we worship you by loving you and others more fully.  Forgive us for the ways that we damage these bodies, especially when we know better.  Give us discipline, motivate our emotions, and make the path clear.  Rebuild in us physical margin.  In Jesus’ name and by the power of your Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Questions for Small Groups
Each week we provide discussion questions for small groups that meet regularly to discuss the message for the week.  Want to find a small group to join?  Email Mark Aupperlee – m_aupperlee@hotmail.com.
1. What factors contribute to our culture’s poor health?
2. Read Genesis 1:26-27.  The word translated “image” can also be translated “idol.”  What could it mean that we are God’s “idols” in creation, God’s temple?  How does that give us guidance for how we treat out bodies?  Are there other scripture verses that might inform how we treat our bodies?
3. Which of the four “R’s” do you need most work on to build physical margin: rebuilding emotional margin, recreation, eating right, or rest?  How can we pray for you?
4. Who do you need to invite to our small group next time that needs help rebuilding physical margin?