Power up your Knees (Part 1)

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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