A New Diet and Exercise

You know that Christmas has given way to New Year's when the Santa commercials are replaced by Jenny Craig commercials. Now approaching the second week of January, all those diet and exercise resolutions are facing their first real challenges. In this season focused on diet and exercise, I'd like to recommend a different kind of diet and exercise.

We've been talking recently about BLESS, a convenient acronym for investing in our neighbors:

• Begin with prayer - pray for your neighbors and for your relationships with them.
• Listen - spend time listening to first the Spirit, who guides us on the mission God has for us; and also to listen to your neighbors, to really hear their stories, thoughts, concerns, and beliefs.
• Eat - share meals with your neighbors, because eating together is one of the best ways to cultivate relationships.
• Serve - with the heart of a servant, find ways to meet the needs or to just bless your neighbors in a way that adds value to their lives.
• Share - if they are open to talking about the things of God, share your story, your concerns, your beliefs, and what God is doing in your life, not as an expert, but as a fellow traveler.

Within this is a new diet and exercise. The diet is sharing meals with your neighbors. I'm all for being good stewards of our bodies by watching what we eat, but if we look at sharing meals regularly with our neighbors as part of our diet, we look at food, meal planning, and the rhythm of life in a different way. Our diet includes the meals we intentionally share with others to deepen our relationships with them.

The exercise can come with the "Serve" idea. For example, we have started in our neighborhood a list of people who need their driveways shoveled when it snows, and a list of guys who are willing to shovel. This last weekend, we helped two families - both were fighting illnesses, one mom had just given birth to premie twins, and the other mom is nine months pregnant. And I got some exercise shoveling someone else's driveway and sidewalk. (I found myself trying to do a better job for them than I do for our own house.)

Now, if I can look at these two kinds of activities as part of my diet and exercise routine, I'm much more likely to keep at it regularly. More importantly, my perspective changes. I'm not looking at diet and exercise as merely self-help, doing things for my own benefit - it is part of loving my neighbor as myself. Now, being involved with my neighbors is less of a project added to my busy life, but rather is integrated into the rhythms of my busy life. Serving them is part of being a healthy person - diet, exercise, an externally focused view, and integrating their good with our good.

I don't write this as a wildly successful veteran, whose missional life is worth emulating. Rather, I write this as a learner, discovering new ways to think about several different aspects of my life which used to be separate and programmatic, but now are becoming blended together and more natural to the normal rhythms of life.

How's your diet and exercise?