Push-up Pain

Push-up Pain

In the moments between sleeping and waking, I felt a painful squeezing in my chest. I think I might have groaned out loud. I ached with a deep soreness that I hadn’t remembered the day before. I wondered if I might have slept awry or if maybe the soreness was a bad case of flu, arriving overnight like an unwelcome visitor.

Then it hit me. It had to have been the push-ups.

The day before, I’d done a fitness assessment, and push-ups were part of the drill. Only I never do them. As in never, ever. And so, nose to the floor, knees bent and feet up, I did a pitiful, paltry number of them before my arms began to quiver and then I melted into the mat.

As hard as it is to believe, that barely double-digit number of push-ups did me in. I recovered quickly enough from them that day, but I paid dearly the next. I was decidedly out of practice in the upper-body-strength department, and if one morning after was any indicator, getting better was going to hurt.

Getting better often requires a pass through the pain department. Pushing past the hurting point is usually where the real work begins, not ends. Have you noticed?

Maybe you’ve extended yourself beyond your usual comfort zone in a relationship, or pushed beyond the place in prayer where you might have given up, or persisted in loving someone whose unlovable actions all but begged you to quit. Maybe you’ve quietly been faithful to a cause no one could see, laboring far beyond the point that it started to hurt.

I’m counting on the fact that my push-up pain will point the way to a stronger body and that I’ll be glad for the trouble it took to get there. In the same way, the day will come when you’ll be glad you bothered to suffer! The payoff will be sweet, not in spite of the hurt, but because of it.

Momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen.

2 Corinthians 4:17-18, NASB