🙌It's the Friday Call to Worship!🙌

I’ve been a self-taught weightlifter for ten years. I purchased a secondhand set of adjustable dumbbells a few years ago when caring for a very young child and one with extra needs made it harder to get to the gym. Those dumbbells finally broke beyond repair last year, so I joined an Olympic weightlifting gym. I had never learned the Olympic lifts but quickly fell in love with the sport. I decided to go all in and even got a pair of lifting shoes for Christmas. I could feel strength building in my entire body and see the evidence of muscle definition. Gaining strength has always been a way for me to honor God with the body He’s entrusted me with.

I was excited to get back to the gym after our recent trip to America. My son with a nervous system disability has gone into a state of burnout, however, and I am currently his 24 hour co-regulator. I tried taking him to the gym with me. He loves it there, but the simple transition was too costly. It’s not my season for Olympic weightlifting. Even if I could get there, I am not recovering from the smallest of workouts due to the physical and mental output of caring for a child in burnout.

The once-firm muscles have softened. Hard-earned callouses are gone. My body feels physically depleted and far from strong. But all of that endurance and training was for this. I might be softening and slowing, but the body God entrusted me with is doing what it needs to do. I feel more purposed in this season than almost any other I’ve weathered - probably because priorities aren’t spread as far or wide. My hard-earned strength is being employed how God sees fit.

And I wonder if another strength grows in softer, slower seasons?

We will endure hard things and soft things, slow seasons and fast ones. We will endure physical and spiritual wildernesses, peaks and valleys. These bodies will carry us through them all. The best thing we can use our bodies for, no matter our season, is worship.

Listen to SEU Worship’s “Slower I Go”.