Power up your Knees (Part 2)

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In part one I talked about the importance of powering up our prayer life to support us through our race of face. Too frequently we allow the increased number of activities in which we participate to put us at risk of “injuring our knees” or relegating prayer as the last of our priorities, leaving us unguarded, vulnerable, and prone to road injuries.

Perhaps we do not pray or do not pray enough because we do not understand what is at stake and what it involves. This is where we can learn a lesson or two about prayer from the proper care of our physical knee joints; in other words, what is good for our knees is also good for our prayer life. The MediZine’s article I referred to in part 1 goes on to provide some suggestions to reinforce our knee joints. Let’s explore their association with prayer:

1. Muscle up
Work out the muscles around your knee and your body core. In other words, exercise other spiritual disciplines simultaneously: our core, such as reading, studying, and meditating in the Scriptures, even using the Scriptures as your model for prayer and praying the Scriptures; and not forgetting the other muscles around, praise, worship, and thanksgiving.

2. Modify your Activities
Joints that you don’t use get bad over time. Use your knees. Find the right balance of your activities and make room for prayer in your schedule. Perhaps there are many things you already know you can give up while others you can give to God in prayer as a living sacrifice. I know some things pop up in your head as you read this… you already have some clues then.

3. Put Feet First
Your knee problem may be originating somewhere else. Typical solution: wear the right shoes for your foot and stride type. Recognize that other things may be hindering your prayer habits. Unisize shoes do not exist. In the same way, “one size fits all” approach to prayer usually does not work for everybody, so find the one model appropriate to your lifestyle.

4. Heat up, Ice down
Apply heat for loosening tight muscles and ice for swelling. Start your prayer asking the fire of the Spirit of God to guide your prayer; to loosen you up when you are uptight or anxious, or to calm you down when having a bad day or your temper swells to the roof. The Spirit of God is your prayer’s Tiger Balm or IcyHot® anointing. Romans 8:26 says (CEV):


“In certain ways we are weak, but the Spirit is here to help us. For example, when we don't know what to pray for, the Spirit prays for us in ways that cannot be put into words.”


5. Get Help
Recognize when you cannot do it by yourself and seek assistance. It is amazing what I have learned about running and injury prevention from more experienced runners and specialists. Prayer partners, accountability groups, mentoring relationships, and our corporate experience of God can certainly guide us to have a richer and more consistent prayer life.

To conclude, we may sometimes arrogantly think that prayer can transform God and His will but we totally miss the point. Prayer is there to transform us, to make us stronger, to sustain us through our life challenges, and to help us find our way around life while keeping up with our race of faith.

[Part 1] [Part 2]




Vladimir Lugo
vlugo@race-of-faith.com

Power up your Knees (Part 1)


También disponible en español También disponible en español

My wife and I like to visit a local grocery store to weight ourselves on a regular basis. The store has one of those scales that give you a print out with your weight and Body Mass Index and we normally keep these records to track our successes in managing our weight. We have been to this store countless times but for the very first time I noted the small format free health magazine over the counter. I decided to pick up an issue for a later read as we moved on after learning that the scale was broken that day.

Several days after, I turned to the magazine and found this helpful article about how to take good care of our joints for the long run. A particular phrase made my spiritual antennae tune up to what had become a persistent idea since. The magazine read:


“As the fulcrum of so much activity,
the knee is highly susceptible to injuries...”
Joint Efforts, MediZine’s Healthy Living, Fall 2009, p. 8


Every runner knows how important our knees are to keep up with the demands of the high impact sport that is running. If our knees are in good shape, we can maintain our gait, keep up with the road changes and demands, run the distance, and sustain our efforts for a prolonged race. On the contrary, nothing can impede you the most from running than a bad or injured knee.

The same holds true in our spiritual race of faith. Our knees represent our prayer life. As the hinge of so much daily activity, prayer is supposed to be well taken care of to support us throughout. However, this is the one area that we most often neglect as activity and responsibility piles up. Waking up in the morning, getting the kids ready for school and ourselves for work, keeping up with the stresses of our jobs or our many other duties, or perhaps with the worries of not having enough to sustain our families during tough times, battling long traffic lines, wasting hours sitting in our cars, rushing through busyness to carry on our businesses, prayer is highly susceptible to injuries.


“As the hinge of so much daily activity…
prayer is highly susceptible to injuries.”


So many times our increase in activities is used as an excuse for our deficient eating schedules and habits, our lack of time to spend with our families and loved ones, to exercise, and to cultivate our spiritual discipline, that makes you wonder whether “lack of time” is really the problem or perhaps it is more a matter of setting our daily priorities right.

Prayer should be high up in our priority list to take us through our daily activities. Martin Luther once said, “Pray, and let God worry.” For this very reason God reminds us to come to Him in prayer (Matthew 11:28, The Message):


“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly.”


The MediZine’s article goes on providing some suggestions to improve our knee joints that are also applicable to the prayer life that will sustain us through our race of faith. We explore these in the second part of this article.

[Part 1] [Part 2]




Vladimir Lugo
vlugo@race-of-faith.com





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