Russellings of the Spirit

“Wow!” my wife remarked to our friend Bill recently as we sat down with he and his wife for dinner… (not his real name, by the way. But I’m not changing it to protect him from embarrassment. I’m changing it because I am about to say something very positive about him and don’t want him to get all full of himself)… She continued, “You really look good! You look like you’ve lost some weight!”

“Yes,” Bill replied. “A bit over 35 pounds.”

And then the accolades and “atta-boys” really started pouring in. I said, “That’s fantastic! Way to go! I sure wish I could muster up that kind of will power myself!”

“Well,” Bill said, “The thing that really helps with that will power thing is when your doctor tells you that you are at risk for a stroke and diabetes if you don’t get your weight under control.”

Yes, I am sure that statement is absolutely true. A frightening prognosis like that would probably get me off my flabby backside quicker than you can say, “Cholesterol.”

But even with an ample supply of sound, scary medical information, Bill still had to ACT on it. He had to be the one to actually turn down the bread and pasta and potatoes and other carbohydrate-loaded foods and choose something else to eat.

HE had to get himself to the gym and do the exercise that burned up some of his excess fat.

HE had to find a way to ignore the little voices telling him that “one little potato chip won’t hurt,” or that no one was looking or that he OWED IT to himself to celebrate his progress and cheat a little with a banana split.

So yes, Bill… even though you were quick to brush it off, you richly deserved the praise we offered.

After saying good night and going our separate ways, I began to think about my own situation and areas of my life where a change of attitude or behavior is needed. And I will confess that while my imprudent approach to eating is certainly one of those areas, it is far from the only one.

I also realized that in every single one of those “areas for improvement”, it is not a lack of information that stalls me.

It is a lack of ACTION.

Paolo Friere, the Brazilian educator, said it this way: “We make the road by walking.”

Morganna Bailey, in her recent TED Talk put it this way: “Clarity comes from ACTING, not from thinking.”

Author Randa Abdel-Fattah said, “Belief means nothing without actions.”

Mark Twain was a little wittier when he said the same thing: “Actions speak louder than words, but not as often.”

And finally Jesus of Nazareth said it like this: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” (Matthew 7:21, NRSV). (Emphasis mine. But I’m sure Jesus would agree.)

Yes, yes. But don’t these people understand that acting can be a little SCARY? Because once you act… once you DO a certain, tangible thing, or take a concrete STEP, you can’t un-act.

We don’t have the same magic editing functions on our actions that come with this lovely word-processing software I’m using here. That software lets me go back, erase, rewrite, revise, and perfect these words until they are JUST RIGHT.

My actions are forever what they originally were.

Maybe that explains the popularity of the many forms of social media these days. Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, and Twitter allow us to believe and speak things with gusto and passion without actually requiring that we take any sort of ACTION.

In the end though, it may all be exactly what Shakespeare called it: “Much ado about nothing.”

So where are you willing to act today? What purposeful deed can flow from your well-developed system of beliefs?

Think about it.

Then ACT.