Holly
I grew up dancing, playing tennis, and cheerleading. Never anything that required serious competition or intense physical training – just pretty average extra-curricular activities that kept me busy and hanging out with friends. I’m not terribly competitive or thrill-seeking and I’ve always been reasonably healthy, so I haven’t really ever been motivated to push my physical limits or hone the craft of exercise. Through college and into marriage, my workout regimen looked like sporadic yoga and jazzercise classes with my mom, walks to and from campus, and one ill-fated run/walk half marathon my college roommates talked me into training for…although I was much more interested in the new gear I got to buy and the road trip weekend involved. In my younger years I often received comments about how I was so lucky that I had a “fast metabolism” and small frame. Though I never had to rely on diet or physical fitness to maintain a certain weight or other health markers, I have consistently gotten tangled up in body image issues and distorted thinking about myself – whether that be using comparison as a metric to fuel my pride, negative self-talk, or an inability to grasp who God says I am.
My husband, Blake, and I are high school sweethearts and got married right after college and moved down to Texas from Kansas. We were blindsided when, a year and a half into marriage, at age 23, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. My prognosis was good, but we were still facing some fairly intense rounds of chemotherapy that lasted the better part of the next year. My body very quickly became not my own and I lived at the mercy of medical procedures, managing side effects, and diet and activity rules set by my Oncologist. At the end of 2013, I was declared in remission and we carried on with our lives, although with a bit more gratitude and assurance of God’s faithfulness. At the end of 2015, after two years of remission, I noticed another lump above my collar bone and sure enough, my cancer was back. It was definitely frustrating to think about doing treatment all over again, but leaning on God’s faithfulness mixed with the fact that we didn’t really have much of a choice to do otherwise, we tackled heavier duty chemo, followed by a stem cell transplant that sent me in and out of the hospital for the next five months and with a critically suppressed immune system for the next year. I found myself yet again, bald, and due to dietary restrictions, treatment side effects, and inactivity, up about 15 pounds, without any type of muscle tone, and with funky skin and permanent scars all over my arms and torso…in short, I was feeling happy to be in remission and done with treatment, but not so confident or great about my body.
WELL’s reputation preceded itself and it seemed like a Watermark staff rite of passage, so Blake and I jumped into WELL group 9, which started about a year after my stem cell transplant. I went in pretty nervous, knowing that I would be starting from ground zero fitness-wise and that I would be pushing my body way further than I ever had before. I also had a bit of an attitude of defiance, wanting to show my body who was in charge after having felt not in charge of it for the better part of the last five years. I was kind of expecting the curriculum to be over-spiritualized and to be Jesus juked all the way to healthy eating, but that’d be ok, it was still a fun group of people to hang out with. My view of physical fitness was that it was a nice extra-curricular activity, probably driven by either guilt or addiction, that some crazy people were way in to, some normal people were moderately in to, and some other still normal people were not in to. I was a nurse before coming on staff at Watermark, so I’ve seen my fair share of terribly unhealthy people who have essentially destroyed their lives due to lack of care and poor decisions. I did not fall into that category of person, so besides just being out of shape from battling cancer, I didn’t feel like I’d have too much to get schooled on mentally and spiritually.
God did a pretty significant transforming work in my heart over the next 12 weeks. I grew in my ability to do sit-ups without modifications, in determining if Bobby’s comments were encouragements or insults, and in overcoming my fear of the wall ball hitting me in the face. But aside from those more practical things, God opened my eyes to a whole new facet of worship and obedience that I had been previously just completely missing. I went from viewing my physical body as just the shell that God had chosen for me that was sort of mine to maintain to the point of survival and that caused me some pretty major inconveniences, to a tool that has been given to me so I might choose to obey, worship, and honor Him.
God also began to tear down my pride as he showed me that Christ-honoring fitness has absolutely nothing to do with what I looked or felt like compared to anyone else around me. There are plenty of people that look fit and can do real pull ups that are so confused about their priorities, and there are plenty of people who might look more like “works in progress” who are truly availing themselves to the blessings found in surrendering their wellness. God cares about having all of me – mind, body, and spirit – not about how long it takes me to finish the Lauderdale compared to the rest of these people or if I “appear” to be in or out of shape.
Very early on in WELL, God showed me how working out could be a really unique way of worship. We serve an infinitely creative God, so I don’t know why it was a surprise to me that I could have a spiritual experience of intense gratitude to the Lord in the middle of kettle bell swings. Perhaps having the experience of so recently being sick in a hospital bed is enough of a stark contrast to get my attention, but my favorite part about exercising is getting to get after it not in a “look what I can do” way, but instead a “look what He has done” kind of way. I love to tell instructors of workout classes I take that I’m a recent cancer survivor, simply because it’s a super easy layup to tell them about what God has done in my life.
I continue to struggle with the lie that I have license to eat whatever I want on days I’ve closed my exercise ring as well as guilt when I feel as though I’ve been lazy or un-purposeful with my schedule or diet. I also continually battle against motivation driven by outward appearance or the desire to appear capable. I feel like I am always walking a fine line on which I could very easily completely abandon any type of discipline related physical health if I didn’t have accountability and consistent reminders of its importance. I still love sweets, sleeping in, sitting on the couch, and avoiding running. These things, thank the Lord, are not inherently bad for me. But, when I zoom out to the big picture and see my schedule and thoughts being dictated by gods that are not God and an attitude that is not that of the endurance and focus of Christ, my stewardship alarm starts to go off and I know I need to make some adjustments.
Satan will do everything in his power to get God’s people to focus on and prioritize the wrong things. He wants some people to be overly concerned with the way we look or the rings we close on our apple watch. He wants some people to think that our bodies belong purely to ourselves and we can use and abuse them how we see fit or that the slippery slopes that come in the form of Costco-sized jars of Nutella are no big deal. If you’re like me, he lures you into believing lies on both sides of that spectrum. However, God continues to be faithful to show me that His perspective brings joy, freedom, and wholeness, and wellness is not an exception to that. I consider myself as someone who lives slightly more face to face with my mortality than perhaps the general public, and I am so thankful for that gift. There is a sweet balance of this world being light and momentary and making good use of the time…truth is that we’re all headed to the grave, but that God cares about how we use the resources He has entrusted to us during the time He gives us on this earth. In terms of surrendered wellness, I’ve learned that faithfulness in that balance can very much involve 5:20am alarm clocks, pancakes, pushing through for another rep you didn’t think you could do, not ever stepping on a scale, sleeping in, being OK with buying a different size of clothes, following fitness gurus on instagram for inspiration, unfollowing fitness gurus on instagram to protect your heart, getting guacamole at Torchy’s instead of queso to try to be more Pro-Fa-C, and not feeling an ounce of guilt when you do get the queso sometimes, just to name a few. My prayer is just that God would continue to present me with opportunities for both small-scale and large-scale faithfulness and that He would cause me to rely on Him so that I might be faithful in all seasons of life, whether that winds me up in the cancer center or in another half marathon.