Tuesday, June 15, 2010

It's All Linked

Spiritual malpractice is offering Jesus as the healer but not offering the safe places, spaces, people, and processes for people to heal.  - Jorge Acevado
This quote caught my attention at Annual Conference last week.  Not necessarily for its shock value (spiritual malpractice anyone!?!), and not even for the truth of the statement or the obvious ramifications of the statement if it is indeed true - but for the bigger truth that his statement uncovers.

It's all linked.

Many of us have tried to segment our lives into personal/private and public - this is where such things as Facebook privacy/security (or lack thereof) come into play; we want to be able to post pictures of our kids for grandma and grandpa to see, but we don't want them in the hands of our local registered sex offenders (or the unregistered ones!). Or we've tried to segment our "religious" lives from our "secular" lives (separation of church and workplace?).And often the church does this as well, separating faith and good works.  We often focus exclusively on evangelism (sharing Jesus) or on feeding the hungry... I suppose the extreme case would be the evangelist who says "I will pray for you" when someone asks for food (on one side) or the person who is feeding the hungry who, when asked for prayer, refuses to invoke the name of Jesus, lest he offends.

The Wesleyan model of "doing church" included a healthy balance of personal piety and social action.  John Wesley said you couldn't have one without the other.

This is all a reminder that it's all linked.  I have been thinking of it in terms of running.  When I run, I experience God.  Why?  Partly because I am pushing my body to be better, to be more like what it was made to be.  After my first "long" race, I was on my way to get cleaned up (in the campground) and had a chance to cheer on some runners.  I ended up in conversation with another runner (who had also already finished) and I made some offhand comment about our bodies not being designed to run this far and she immediately said, "Yes they are; otherwise we wouldn't be able to do it." 

Good point. There are all sorts of things we were made to do, and they're all linked.

I made a comment in my previous post about eating better when I run.  I have never gone on a diet (well, I made a real concerted effort to eat healthy when I was on the wrestling team in high school, but I couldn't lose any weight, and then when I "blew" my diet by binging on pizza, I weighed in 1/2 pound lighter the next day), but when I'm in training, I do find myself looking for healthy alternatives to some of my favorite junk foods.

And, of course, that affects my running.

Because it's all linked.  Spiritual is linked to physical is linked to emotional is linked to intellectual. if we are screwed up in one area (which most (all?) of us are), it's going to adversely affect other areas.  But on the other hand, if we get healthy in one area, it will positively affect other areas as well.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

errrrrrrr! That was the sound of brakes. Hold the phone,stop the presses. Do we have a wrestling history? I think so. Just when I thought this couldn't get any better. Don't let me down.

Brian Vinson said...

Don't get your hopes up; my wrestling history was a very short one, ending with a black-out and never seeing competition... :-)

Chad said...

Hey great post, just stumbled on your blog. I agree its all connected.
I am a follower of Jesus and a runner...check out my running blog:

http://runningfool-ootaynee.blogspot.com/