A Few Analogies for Faith

A few days ago, while driving to work, I began to think about the diet/exercise program I've begun, it's the "Hacker's Diet" you can check it out here. Being the church nerd that I am, it quickly moved into ideas that related to faith and sermon preparation.

I've heard the analogy before about thinking of Sunday worship like eating a meal. "You wouldn't eat a cheeseburger one day and expect it to carry you through the week would you?" The idea being that Sunday worship "feeds" us, and we're starving our faith because we don't have enough to eat. I think this idea gets it backwards. Worship isn't about feeding us. Worship isn't about us at all. Well that's a novel idea isn't it? No analogy is perfect of course, and I am certain the ones I am about to put forth have their flaws as well, but this one plays to our culture too much. It takes the act of worshiping our God, and places the emphasis on what it does for us. In essence we're all a bunch of little idols running into the sanctuary waiting for the pastor to "Wow, me." Ok maybe that is a little extreme but it should make it easy to get my point.

So being a former track star, I'm always looking for ways to compare things to track, since it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling to relive those days. For once I actually came up with a decent comparison. When track season was approaching, we started conditioning weeks in advance, so that when it came time to have a meet, we would be in shape. To get in shape required that we run, a lot, throughout the weeks leading up to the meet. One couldn't expect to just walk up to the starting line and win when the other 7 people lining up had gotten in shape.

Hopefully you've already figured out where I'm going with this analogy. If we look at Sunday as "the event" to perform at rather than to gain from it changes our faith strategy. The rest of the week isn't spent living off of that moment, but rather building up to it. If we are using and exercising our faith throughout the week, how much better will our part in the event be? If I skipped practices for a month (or even a week!) I would be letting my teammates down when the next meet came up, because I wouldn't get the points we needed, or hold up my leg of the relay.

The other part of this, which deals more with the "Hacker's Diet", is that we are living in an age of instant gratification. So many diet's fail because the first few days of it are pretty hard and we don't see immediate results, so we assume it isn't working and throw in the towel. Our expectations of our New Year's resolution to exercise and get in shape often fail within the first month because we don't see immediate results and it is just too much effort. (The author of the "Hacker's Diet" points out 1 full hour of non-stop running only burns about 700 calories, which is the equivalent to a big mac and fries (no drink or 0-calorie diet soda) or 50z. of BAKED potato chips.

How does this relate to faith then? Well we often want to have a sense of a strong faith, like those saints and bastions of faith that we hear so much about. Again though it's like trying to run a marathon without every training! Part of our conditioning for track was starting out small and working out way up. We set an achievable goal for the end of the season, we set goals to attain by extra effort and personal bests, and we set goals for our first meet. For instance one year my season goal was to run the 400m dash in 51.0 seconds, my extra effort was to beat the school record of 49.9 seconds, and my first meet goal...55.0 seconds. You have to start somewhere. Our training to reflected a build up, beginning of the season 4 laps, then run a 100, 200, 200, 100 at about a 60% pace. End of the season 6 laps, then run 200, 200, 300, 400, 300, 100 at 75%-80% pace. Recovery times between each of those sprints went down from 60 seconds to 20 seconds. All those numbers are probably pretty meaningless to most people, but what they represent is a build up as we got stronger, we didn't start by doing the hardest stuff right out of the gate because it quite possibly could have killed us, and just wasn't healthy.

So too with our faith! If we've been neglecting it for years we shouldn't expect it to just drive our lives all of the sudden. Granted we hear stories of new Christians who immediately after converting are just so strong in their faith, but how many of them actually were converted by just walking aimlessly into the church one day? I think you'll find many of them were influenced by other Christians, and looked into scriptures on their own, and probably went to worship several times and then had their wonderful conversion experience. The point is we need to build our faith, and that won't come from only attending "the event". But we don't want to over-extend ourselves when we've gotten out of shape. We have to build our faith, which takes time, and effort. A simple way to start is a daily devotion, it doesn't have to be an hour long spiritual session every day, but maybe 5-10 minutes at the beginning of one's day. There are two ways that this can go. One like the "Hacker's Diet" exercise routine, the time will never increase, but the quality will, and you'll get more and more out of it. The other thing that may happen is it'll really get a hold of you. You may find yourself devoting 15 minutes, then 20 minutes, then 30 minutes. The same holds true for prayer, scripture reading, and other faith practices. Then comes time for "the event" we'll all do much better, and come time for those spontaneous times where we may need to exercise our faith other times, death, tragedy, crisis, moral decisions, it will be there and ready for us to use.