Resist the Rut: 4 Keys to Kickstart Your Heartናሙና

Day 1: What Needs To Be Broken So You Can Build?

Raise your hand if you’ve ever felt like you were in a rut of life. If you’ve ever simply felt like you were barely jogging in place and losing interest by the mile, please stand up.

Me too.

The best part of a seemingly hopeless and aimless rut is that we don’t have to stay there once we identify it and own it. Too many men feel shame for losing direction, finding themselves at the bottom of a pile of smoldering coals that were once a raging fire of passion and purpose in their lives.

Jesus promised a life of abundance (John 10:10). It’s not about where you start or how you allow yourself to veer off into a detour, but how you re-route and re-calibrate the coordinates for your destination. What matters most is that you keep going.

In my consideration of the group who might fall into this category of spiritual apathy or lethargy, I am eager to create a roadmap that has worked for me in the past and continues to do so today. I have four questions for all of us that will unveil the mystery of what it will take to re-ignite the fire of our mission, purpose, passion, and direction. Stay with me and we will uncover ways to surprise ourselves and the people we serve.

Question #1 - What needs to be broken so you can build?

As you know, sometimes a home that has accumulated black mold must be stripped down to the bare studs and re-built. Sometimes the mundane routine needs to be scrapped for a new way of doing things that are outside our comfort zone and have become a coffin of complacency. Maybe there are things in our lives we need to remove. Sometimes the proverbial fat needs to be trimmed away.

Several years ago, I made some difficult decisions that required me to close the book on friends from a ‘former life’. I was holding on to old relationships that were from a time in my life when I had different motivations, interests, and goals. Those relationships were for a season of experimentation and self-indulgence. As you might imagine, as we get older, that form of toxicity does not serve the men we need to become and the moral compass we establish as husbands, fathers, and followers of Christ. It was necessary to separate from connections of my ‘old self’, and pursue friendships with like-minded men who shared the same mission of purposefully serving, protecting, and providing for the people they love.

I can confidently assume that the Apostle Paul wasn’t playing checkers with the same group of old Christian-persecuting buddies after his radical encounter with Jesus. I would bet he wasn’t visiting the same taverns or TP’ing the same huts from his more belligerent days.

Some of you are still holding on to the glory days and reminiscing with the cool crowd that was once the echo chamber of your depravity. It’s time to break those chains to make room for new, healthy connections.

As men, we talk a lot about mindset and positive self-talk and wonder why we seem to consistently arrive at a mental block or rut in our thinking. I will argue that our physical condition either impedes or fosters a healthy mental framework and thought life. Physical fitness, strength training, or cardiovascular aerobic activity, stimulates the mind and activates endorphins which initiate positive thinking.

The Bible calls our body the temple of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes we need to renovate and demolish aspects of that temple so we can re-build it stronger. I created a disciplined routine of strength training with weightlifting since college and I am a firm believer that it improves my mindset.

When you break your body down, you reveal many things about your character. You determine if you’re a quitter when things get hard and painful. You become extremely humble when you realize there is a limit to your strength. It isolates you enough to disable distractions and creates an opportunity for our hearts to hear from the Holy Spirit. I have experienced countless encounters with God in those moments of maximum physical resistance, where I was sweating profusely and straining to push one more rep.

If you are not breaking your body down in a healthy and productive environment (gym, self-defense or martial arts dojo, the open road), you are missing a key ingredient to the recipe for snapping out of the trance that has become your boring routine.

TURNING POINT:

• Break a routine and experiment with a new normal.
• Do an activity that will make you sore the next morning.
• Stop sending friend requests to old college drinking buddies whom you haven’t spoken to in more than two decades.