Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

I have embarked on a necessary but annoying health reset. It’s a bit of exercise, diet, and the like all rolled together. There are definitely overlaps between how we approach our spiritual and physical health. The chief among those overlaps seems to simply be intentionality.

Approaching each meal or workout with a level of presence and awareness that makes them more than one more thing done without reflection. It is far too easy to shovel in food or neglect any exercise at all because our bodies seem to like habit.

Our prayer lives fall into this – we skip prayers here or there, don’t make a confession, decide that we don’t have time because of this or that pressing need. Before we are even aware of it, we slip into mindless, unintentional living.

We lose track of the source of all of our gifts and begin to treat those gifts loosely and with little regard for their deeper value – their consecration to God.

I am beginning to think that I need to pray and exercise as if my life depends on it.

It does.

The Psalmist asks God to teach us to number our days. In that simple prayer lies a powerful recognition that the most precious thing we have is to be cherished – its measure is to be numbered – for it is short.

Our lives, to have fullness, must have a well-balanced hub. Different spokes, when misaligned or out of joint, will cause the whole thing to wobble and then, without warning, to sometimes fly off.

Different people have different spokes that need our intentional focus.

We have work, family, recreation, church, health, relationships, and devotion. If any of these becomes misaligned, it begins to put stress on all of the others until suddenly the wheel, the whole thing, just won’t move.

We get stuck and can’t even begin to figure out how to pry loose that which seems stuck beyond repair and what once seemed a blessing, whether our work or health or relationships, suddenly seem like a curse. Oftentimes the curse is that we’ve not tended them and now they can’t tend, support, or renew us either.

They all need intentionality from time to time lest we take them for granted. So that’s where I find myself with health these days. It needs some intentionality.

May you find renewed intentionality in your life wherever you need it (and pray for me to keep finding it too) in the week ahead!

Yours in Christ,

Fr Robert