I want to tell you about a Tuesday morning in the weight room when I was 58 years old.
I had been working toward 335 lbs on the bench press for a long time. Not because of any competition. Not for anyone else. Just because it was a number that seemed impossible, and I've always been drawn to things that seem impossible.
I laid down under the bar. Did the math one more time. Took a breath.
And lifted it.
Three times.
I didn't celebrate much. I just sat up, thought about it for a moment, and went on with my workout.
But something was different. And it took me a while to figure out what it was.
🏋️You don't lift 335 on the first day.
Here's the obvious thing about strength training that took me years to actually internalize:
The work that gets you to 335 is invisible at the time you're doing it.
Nobody quits at 135. You quit at 305. When you've put in years of real work and the goal still isn't there. When the progress slows. When your body hurts in ways it didn't used to. When you wonder if you were kidding yourself the whole time.
That's the long game. And most people don't play it.
🙏The spiritual parallel isn't subtle.
I've been a follower of Jesus my whole adult life. And the part nobody told me when I started is this:
Faith is a long game. So is character. So is becoming the kind of person you actually want to be.
You don't wake up one morning with patience. You don't decide to be generous and then simply are. You don't choose to love difficult people and find it easy.
You show up. You do the reps. You fail. You rest. You show up again.
"The work that forms you mostly happens in the sessions where nothing dramatic occurs. Tuesday morning. No audience. No breakthrough. Just the weight, and you, and the decision to come back."
Dallas Willard talked about spiritual formation as the process by which the inner life is restructured. That restructuring doesn't happen in one great emotional moment. It happens in the accumulated weight of a thousand ordinary choices in ordinary moments.
The Stoics had a word for this: askesis. Practice. Discipline. The daily reps of living according to what you actually believe, not what you merely say you believe.
😩The part that's hard to say out loud.
There were months in the weight room when I made no measurable progress.
The weight didn't go up. I wasn't getting stronger — or at least I couldn't measure it. The reps were hard and the bar didn't budge past where it had been before.
During those seasons, I had two choices:
This is where faith and the weight room converge completely.
Because the Spirit works the same way. There are seasons of apparent dryness — where prayer doesn't feel like anything, where Scripture doesn't open, where you can't measure growth and start to wonder if anything is actually happening.
And the saints — all of them — say the same thing about those seasons:
Keep showing up. The work is still working. The formation is still happening. Below the surface, things are being restructured that you won't be able to measure until later.
✨I'm not at 400 lbs yet. I have a goal list that has 400 on it, and I'm working toward it.
But the weight room has taught me something more durable than a number:
The long game is real. The reps compound. The work you do in the ordinary, un-witnessed Tuesday morning sessions is the work that actually builds you.
Nobody sees it but you. And God. And someday — when you're ready — the bar goes up.
Three times.
