My sister-in-law, Michelle, is a runner.
Like all women, she is MANY things. Wife, mother, employee, daycare for her sister’s toddler, etc. But this woman has been running for years, and she’s got the calves to prove it. She and Brad’s brother, John, live in Augusta near Brad’s parents and they regularly have us over and entertain us and feed us when we’re up there.
The kids (well, half of them aren’t really kids anymore) jump on the trampoline and play video games in their fabulous rec room. The guys usually end up watching football in the living room and the women do what women do, chat in the kitchen. (I mean, I can only take so much football. I just cannot care about every. Single. Game.)
Over New Years a couple years ago I walked through the rec room to use the bathroom and when I came out, I saw a horrific sight that haunted me for months. Seriously, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Michelle’s treadmill was set up facing a wall. Now facing a blank wall would be bad enough. But no, it was facing a wall with a full-sized stop sign on it.
We had been talking about running the day before, discussing the pros and cons of running on the road versus running on a treadmill. I told her how running on a treadmill is great because you can just zone out and watch TV. She told me that wouldn’t work in her house because her treadmill faces a stop sign.
I didn’t quite understand and we moved onto another topic so I forgot about it. But when I saw it for myself, I was traumatized.
Now to be fair, the stop sign is a really cool rec room decoration. But the thought of running toward it was just more than I could stand.
I went into the other room, aghast. “Michelle, that stop sign is horrible!”
She laughed. “I told you!”
“No, seriously,” I continued. “You CANNOT face that when you run. It can’t be good for you. I mean, your body is working hard and your eyes are staring at the word STOP. You’re giving yourself mixed signals. That would seriously mess me up. You’re probably doing all kinds of psychological damage.”
She laughed it off and the conversation moved on. But I didn’t. I actually looked online several times for any other road sign in the world that I could buy her to run toward. (Did you know you can buy road signs online? True story.)
When you approach the tollbooths in Orlando with your SunPass, you see all these signs that say DO NOT STOP. And for the life of me, I could not find that one online. I had considered taking a sharpie, writing DO NOT on a piece of cardboard and taping it above the STOP next time I was there.
Thankfully she told me a few months later that she had moved her treadmill and that brought a wave of relief.
Maybe because I know the cost of sending myself mixed signals.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus spoke strongly against making unnecessary vows. Not wedding vows or anything like that (those are VERY necessary). Just adding an extra drama to doing what you say you’ll do.
All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one. John 5:37.
Know what’s better than swearing by heaven or on your life or on the life of your mother? Just building a reputation of integrity.
Integrity is when everything you say and do line up.
I take integrity pretty seriously, as it relates to my relationships. I’m not perfect, but being believable, reliable and trustworthy to others is critically important to me.
However, I’m not always so good about having integrity with myself.
I will waffle, justify, rationalize. Make myself all sorts of promises only to break them the moment they are challenged. I will make plans to do something, only to cancel on myself whenever I feel like it.
[Just to clarify, when I talk to myself, it’s a dialogue, not a monologue. I say ‘we’ instead of ‘I,’ which is probably an indication of much bigger problems/issues. Whatever. They’re just gonna have to take a number.]
We need to eat real food to be healthy and strong. Then a vacation comes up. Or we go to my favorite restaurant. Or one of my children wants to bond with me over nachos or milkshakes.
Let’s exercise three times a week to take care of ourself. Then I get busy, tired, lazy, sore, disinterested, distracted, making excuses.
Our faith and our relationship with God are desperately important to us. Then I hit the snooze bar and push aside my morning prayer/devotion time for another 30 minutes of sleep.
We should write 30 minutes every day, just to be consistent. Then some days I have nothing to say, nothing I feel strongly about, the words don’t come easy and I give up and putter around on Facebook.
One time my therapist told me, “If I were driving down the road and saw two people on the sidewalk with one of them talking to the other the way you talk to yourself, I would call 911.”
My self-talk has gotten significantly better since that time. But if I treated a friend with the inconsistency, unreliability, broken promises and cancelled dates that I hand myself, well, I don’t think the relationship would last very long.
So why am I always last on the list of people who get my integrity? Same reason I’m the last on the list of people who get my time and energy. (Cue the victim mentality and Martyr Mode here.)
And the struggle is real. Even Paul couldn’t get his intentions and his actions to line up.
I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Romans 7:15-19
I sometimes catch myself explaining something I’ve said, something I’m currently eating or a time that I had a few too many drinks with, “I just have no self control.”
When I tell others that, it’s half-excuse, half-joke.
When I tell MYSELF that, it’s laying another brick on the house I’m building on mediocrity. I let myself off the hook for ever being anything other than a prisoner of my appetites. No agency, no choice in the matter. Stuck by my own proclamation.
It’s a lie from the pit of hell to keep me chained to the bench in the game of life. Like running hard on a treadmill, covering no real ground, staring at an unmoving stop sign.
If I were to get in my face about it (yep, we’re talking to ourself again), I would say, “Really? You really have NO SELF CONTROL? What about the time you got on Weight Watchers and lost 20 pounds? What about the times people have wronged you and you kept your mouth shut about them when people give you a wide-open invitation rip them to shreds? What about the confidentiality you maintain for your clients? What about the fruit of the Spirit that includes self control and the fact that the Holy Spirit resides in your person? No self control? THAT’S. JUST. NOT. TRUE.”
I’ve heard that if you tell yourself a lie long enough, even YOU will start to believe it. All the more reason we must speak truth over ourselves, not just each other.
And not ‘our truth,’ not what we WANT to be true. The Truth. Who God says I am.
I need to find that DO NOT STOP sign for my office (which is my half of our sectional upstairs). And I need to look at it every day. I need to open up my Bible. And I need to look at it every day.
And then I need to do what it says.
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