Last Updated on February 24, 2022
When he’s training for the Olympics, swimmer Michael Phelps eats 12,000 calories a day. For some fat guys like me, that should be a dream come true. But in all honesty, I don’t think even my stomach would be agreeable to a calorie load like that.
Phelps, on the other hand, who’s definitely in great shape, actually needs those 12,000 calories — six times what an average man requires — for his workout regimen of six hours a day, six days a week.
Without fail.
Even when Christmas falls on one of his scheduled training days, he trains.
That’s a choice he makes. Making the right choices, as you might imagine, was the topic of today’s reading in 100 Days of Integrity for Men.
What does he have to show for those choices? Fourteen career Olympic gold medals, the most by any Olympian. He has also broken, so far, 37 world records in swimming.
No matter what we’re trying to achieve, success rarely comes with a lot of hard work. And hard work requires discipline and the continual choices to stay focused on your goals.
For a lot of Christians, and I definitely include myself in this one, there’s some disconnect when it comes to right choices.
It’s as if we think we can just go to church once a week — or maybe more than once a week — and then put no more time into our relationship with God than that, and yet God will reward us at every turn. And a lot of us get frustrated when that doesn’t happen.
I truly believe that God wants to be able to reward us with bright futures in this life and in the afterlife. That doesn’t mean that I think God wants us all to have mansions and drive limousines; a bright future and a happy life need not require mind-numbing monetary wealth, even in a Capitalistic society like ours.
But we don’t really get the chance to live out the plans to prosper us God tells us he has until we start making more of the choices that help us live up to being who we say we are.
