Last updated on March 19, 2014
After you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself perfect, confirm, strengthen and establish you.
1 Peter 5:10
Somehow, I turned into a fitness maven.
I wouldn’t call myself an exercise nut by any means. I spent much of my childhood dabbling in said childhood’s delights, including all varieties of candies, sodas, and other sugary confections. As a result, I have what modern parlance would call a “gut”. I deserve it, admittedly, for not doing enough to remove it fully at a younger age, but the academic lifestyle did not help. The life of the mind does not often care about the body!
Of course, at some point, you just need to get over it and get rid of it, so that’s been my goal for the past year and a half or so. If I’m gonna sit on my buttocks and write/read/podcast all the time, I can’t just let my muscles and stomach lining wither away from disuse. Thus did the exercise regimen begin. I already lifted weights, but that doesn’t do a thing for your heart other than cause strain. I needed something difficult that a youngin’ like me could do, that would challenge me and force me to focus on it. Riding a bike or treadmill’s too dull, and I often find myself running/pedaling slow purely out of distraction. The solution?
Physique 57 changed all of that. A exercise regiment created by Tanya Becker based on the Lotte Berk method of barre training (have fun Googling all that!), it’s the most intense workout I believe I’ve ever experienced. As per the name, it contains 57 minutes of a nonstop set that uses every muscle in your body interspersed with stretches. When I say it doesn’t stop, I MEAN it doesn’t stop. The first couple tries will induce pain and suffering, believe me; you need to take breaks most of the time, even though you’re not supposed to do that. I found myself completely short of breath. Honestly, it didn’t seem to matter how else you prepared: Physique 57 hates your guts. Either you’ll submit to its whims and hold your leg up for ten minutes at a time whole doing stretches, or you’ll quit like a whining baby.
I’m not one to give up easily, so I persevered. I did this three times a week for the past six months or so, and the difference is clear. None of this was easy. It required a pretty high level of stubbornness (I will not let this stupid thing beat me!) and commitment (I will do something that my body hates three times a week for the rest of my foreseeable life). Sometimes, the aches aren’t good, and sometimes you will feel exhausted by its end. That doesn’t mean it does not work! If you want something, you need to work hard in order to get it. That’s just the way of things.
Video games gave me a similar lesson. I temporarily quit King of Fighters XIII after suffering what I would call, lightly speaking, a “catastrophic series of losses”. When you play people in KOF XIII who, clearly, know the game’s rules much better than you, it’s hard for a beginner (94 hours!) to do anything of substance. You just need a break from the practice at that point, and playing more won’t help. However, when I returned to the game, I resolved to learn how to play once again. I will not retreat to Street Fighter IV unless absolutely necessary!
Step one in that process involved learning the timing on Takuma’s bread and butter combo string. Like most of the best characters in the game, Takuma’s moveset includes a two hit string that involves C, f+B. Unlike most of those characters, Takuma requires you to charge down back, then hit forward and kick in the middle of that string. Tell me if this sounds easy, and I will hurt you plenty. Learning to do it, and learning to do it consistently remain two different things entirely! That does not mean it’s unlearnable, but it takes at least a few hours for the muscle memory to kick in.
Thankfully, after practicing it for so long, I am actually able to do Takuma combos in real matches. Since his damage turns from mediocre to absolutely terrifying with this default combo, I am quite happy to play KOF now! In the end, though, it required a substantial time commitment to learn this at all. Fighting games require this in general, but KOF’s by far the hardest including execution requirements. HD combos alone should frighten you out of your gourd:
That’s not impossible. It just takes some dedication and hard work. Pat Gann said something similar on our most recent podcast: it’s not true that you “have no life” if you dedicate time to fighting games. The situation really makes fighting games a PART of your life, and that’s the mentality you need in order to succeed in a competitive sense.
All of this talk of success requires failing. A lot. In the words of Walt Disney:
I think it’s important to have a good hard failure when you’re young. I learned a lot out of that. Because it makes you kind of aware of what can happen to you. Because of it I’ve never had any fear in my whole life when we’ve been near collapse and all of that. I’ve never been afraid. I’ve never had the feeling I couldn’t walk out and get a job doing something.
The same remains true of our Christian walk. Will we fail? Yes. That’s an inevitability. In the same way I fail in doing Physique 57 well, or fail to perform HD combos up to snuff, we can easily lapse when it comes to Christian faith. Anyone who says otherwise obviously has not read the Bible at all. Trials exist; temptations accost us daily. Just look at this cursory list of “things to do” from Paul in 1 Thessalonians 4:1-8
Finally then, brethren, we request and exhort you in the Lord Jesus, that as you received from us instruction as to how you ought to walk and please God (just as you actually do walk), that you excel still more. For you know what commandments we gave you by the authority of the Lord Jesus. For this is the will of God, your sanctification; that is, that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each of you know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not in lustful passion, like the Gentiles who do not know God; and that no man transgress and defraud his brother in the matter because the Lord is the avenger in all these things, just as we also told you before and solemnly warned you. For God has not called us for the purpose of impurity, but in sanctification. 8 So, he who rejects this is not rejecting man but the God who gives His Holy Spirit to you.
None of this sounds hard, but you know from personal experience that it is, indeed, difficult to maintain day in and day out. Doing the right thing goes against our nature. And yet, if you practice at it, on days where you feel like it and days that you don’t, that mode of thought and action becomes a part of you over time. Practice and practice over and over again. What first felt difficult becomes natural. Training helps!
Sanctification requires time, effort, commitment, and stubbornness. You don’t just get rid of bad habits, or learn new skills, or do anything simply by thinking it. You must remain cognizant of your own failings, and work to improve them. God will help in the task, if only you ask. That doesn’t mean things will solve themselves; you still need to put in the work in whatever you’re doing.
Heck, if I can get in shape and actually execute combos in some of the most difficult fighting game mechanics of all time, then becoming a better Christian should also come with the right mindset and work ethic.
