Faith and Fitness

I was just visiting my local Starbucks and had forgotten the ashes smeared on my forehead.

“Is it for that Catholic holiday?” the young barista asked. “What are you giving up?”

It’s the first question many of us are asked: “What are you giving up?”

Some use this as an excuse to finally discipline our lives out of drinking soda or eating cookies. Some use this as a way to torture ourselves in hopes we can somehow relate to the torture Jesus went through. (No, friends, giving up McDonald’s is *not* like being killed on a cross).

Over the past few years, though, I’ve been convicted that it isn’t about giving up something for us to torture ourselves, but embracing God in some way we haven’t been already.

So this year, I’m giving up and making room.

I’ve decided to give up TV (oh, don’t you worry, I will catch up on “This is Us” on Sundays) in order to free my time at night for reading and reflection and maybe even sleeping.

I’ve also decided to really tackle a project I’ve been saying I want to do for years. That is creating YouTube content discussing the faith and fitness connection. There are many many many resources out there for fitness, but as I have dug through, I’ve seen a huge gap out there for this kind of content. The challenge for me is that I hate (hate hate hate) being on camera, so posting every day will help me lean into that challenge. If you’ve noticed, I’ve tried on Instagram to post more videos of me lifting-this isn’t for my own ego, but to help me try to get used to producing this kind of content and to get beyond the simple embarrassment of setting up a camera in the gym. The other challenge for me is that when I tried to do this about a year or so ago, I wanted everything to be perfect. Posting daily will mean that some of the content will be a little messy. Some won’t look the way I want it to. And I’ll have to deal with that!

So, for the next 40 days (minus Sundays), I’ll be posting daily videos discussing some part of that. I’m posting this here so y’all can keep me accountable!

I’ll go back to using my personal Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/abhutchison00 if you wanna follow along! I’ll video tonight, but I may not post until tomorrow because it’s gonna be a long day!