My Fitness Challenge

I have been overweight most of my life, and I have recently begun an effort at turning the ship around. The immediate catalyst for this was my church facilities manager developing a Staff "Get Healthy" Initiative.

Mostly the Initiative is simply accountability in the form of a weekly weigh-in. He presented a point system which scales the amount of points per pound based on your weight loss goal. Because I have a lot of weight to lose, I will earn very few points per pound. Others who have very little weight to lose will score several points per pound loss.

It was nice to know going into this that several other people on staff were participating, and our facilities manager has the results posted each week for the "biggest loser" in the male and female categories. I won week one with 13 pounds!

Why
I thought I'd share some of the reasons why I want to lose weight:

• I would like to be a good steward of what God has given me -- my body
• After hearing Mark Driscoll give his Reverse Engineering Your Life talk, I imagined into the future a few years and decided that this is not what I want my diet/body/health level to be like
• For my wife -- I want to be fit for her and she has already told me she wants to precede me in death -- so I need to start extending my life potential
• Student ministry, seminary, and software development -- none of these are very conducive to good health -- I need to counter some of that
  
• To be better prepared to share in another culture -- so that my fitness would not be a hurdle to the Gospel for people in other cultures that may already view Americans as selfish, gluttons, or materialistic. Also, so that I will be healthy even in an environment that might be sub-optimal
• To prepare to meet standards for missions sending agencies -- currently, I would not meet the International Mission Board requirement for Body Mass Index. Whether we seek service with the IMB or some other agency, I hope that my weight will not be an obstacle

As you can see, there are some big reasons for me to get in shape! (Pun intended.)

My Fitness Goal
My long-term goal is to lose 95 pounds. This would put me at 190 pounds and a BMI of ~ 25.5 (which sadly is still in the "overweight" category on most scales. I cannot imagine that I would be unhealthy at that weight, though -- BMI is not a perfect measurement. We'll see.)

Current Progress
I have lost a 15 pounds so far, which puts me at 16% of the way to my goal. I'm confident that the last 16% will be much harder than the first 16%! If I were able to continue at this pace, I would reach my goal by November! I think spring may be a more reasonable goal.

Thanks to my dietetics / nutritionist friends out there!

First Day of Student Life Camp

This week I'm away with about 45 kids at Student Life Camp. The first day has gone very well - no bus break-downs (like last year and seemingly every other trip), and like always the SLC staff is very organized and makes everything go very smoothly.

I'm sitting beside my buddy Logan, who is considering unlinking me from his blog, because of my inactivity. This post is to court his future linkage. I hope it works.

Pray for us as we have teams ministering in Chattanooga and we hope that our students are presented with God's Word and that it touches their lives and brings them away from camp focused more on Christ and with a better grasp of the Gospel.