Have you ever noticed that when you feel sick, it’s extremely hard to imagine what it feels like to feel healthy? When you’re hurling into the toilet, you don’t remember the feeling of intense pleasure you felt when you were sitting at the restaurant and your food was arriving at your table.
Vice versa, it’s also hard when you’re feeling really good to imagine what you felt like when you were sick. Though I admit it’s probably easier. Your mind is less taken up by feeling terrible so your imagination is maybe able to help a bot more.
In any case, however, you’re not actually feeling the same feelings that you were when you were sick when you’re not. You most likely don’t have the same desires.
Four days ago, I had a lake day with friends. We rode my friend’s boat, we played frisbee on the beach, ate lunch, tubed, made hot chocolate. It was a grand time full of lots of fun.
After tubing, I realized how much adrenaline can help you get through stuff, because while I was on the tube, I was holding on tight, and by the end, I was tired, but if I needed to, I could have held on longer. Once I actually got back on the boat though, in less than a minute, my arms were throbbing. I didn’t even realize how much muscle I was having to use to hold onto the tube. My friend John, who was driving the boat (and owned the boat), went hard. I was grasping hard, but I didn’t realize how hard until I got out and my body was in pain. It was a different kind of pain than I was used to, even after working out.
It was an intense, almost stinging pain. Like I had just done the most intense grip strength exercise of my life. I didn’t think a ton of it because after about 30 minutes it was gone. I could tell I had done it, but it was no longer stinging.
The next day, I didn’t feel much, and my body wasn’t honestly even that sore. Same thing 2 days after. I felt a little soreness, especially in my neck, but wasn’t even as bad as I was expecting.
Then, yesterday, out of nowhere, my pectoral muscle on my right side started throbbing. I should say I woke up and it was throbbing. I didn’t know what had happened or if I had slept on it the wrong way, but it was not very fun, and it was hard to move. I hoped last night going to bed that it would be better, but in some ways, it’s just worse today, and as I tried playing basketball tonight, I could barely lift my arm over my head to rebound.
It was through all of this that I realized once again the fragility of the human body. Humans are not in control. God has complete control over everything. If we want to go out and run but God doesn’t want us to, he could easily make something in our body go wrong so that all of a sudden we can’t even stand.
The body can be resilient and often is. It holds up to things that don’t seem possible, then at the same time, it is so fragile that it seems you can sometimes do everything right and yet it still breaks.
If nothing else, this tells me that there are many things at work outside of this world that affects how our bodies perform.
Don’t take for granted what you can do with your body, even if it’s not as much as others can do. Everything you can do, including taking a breath, is given to you by God.