For Wilshire Baptist Church
I’ve begun physical therapy to get my right arm moving again following surgery to repair a torn rotator tendon. It’s slow work, sometimes boring and sometimes painful, but with each session I can see my range of motion increasing. One of the keys to success is handing over control to someone else, and that’s something I’m not very good at.
At the end of each session of exercises, the therapist works on my shoulder to stretch me and loosen me up. While I lay on my back on a padded table, he takes my arm in his hands and slowly and carefully works my shoulder joint in different directions. The first time we did this, he said, “Just relax and let your arm go limp and let me do the work for you,” but a minute into it, with my arm pointing straight up toward the ceiling, he let go of me and confirmed what he could feel: I wasn’t relaxing at all. My arm should have dropped dead to the table, but instead it remained pointing upward because I had not relinquished control. Ever since then, I’ve had to consciously work at not using my muscles to support myself while the therapist does his thing. And that’s important because my stitched tendon is not healed enough to work on its own.
There’s a popular saying, “Let Go, Let God,” that I see printed on t-shirts and coffee mugs and planks of wood at craft shops. It’s a catchy way of saying: Quit trying to control everything and trust that God will take care of you. It sounds pretty simple but it’s not, because we think we can control things. And often it looks and feels like we are doing exactly that, but then something unexpected happens and we realize we weren’t in control after all. Or, we thought we knew what was best and we ended up hurting ourselves or others.
Another key to post-surgery success is to take care of myself between sessions. That includes going through a series of exercises three times a day at home. The exercises employ gravity and passive motions that move my shoulder and help build my strength. While waiting on my session earlier this week, I overheard the therapist tell another client she was regressing in her recovery because she wasn’t doing the homework. I took that to heart because I want to get back to work with my shoulders and arms as soon as possible – whether that be pushing a lawnmower, getting back on the saxophone, or carrying a backpack down a trail.
In similar fashion, there are ways to exercise our spirit that can help build our spiritual strength even as we give God the lead in our lives: prayer, meditation, scripture study to name a few. If we go to church and passively sit through worship and do nothing else, we really can’t expect to experience much spiritual growth. And we certainly won’t be equipped to serve others in the spirit of Christ as is our calling.
Bottom line: “Let Go, Let God” is a good start toward “Let’s Go Do This Together.”