Today's thought: Don't see me through ugly eyes, the reflection may be from a mirror.
With the new changes in my life, I got a membership to a very popular fitness club and the place is great. It has every machine you can think of to help every part of your body. If I didn't have anything else to do, I think I would spend every waking moment there. But I haven't always been this comfortable in a gym environment. Being a big girl, I do struggle with some of the equipment. It's not so easy for me to just slide in and start working on just any machine. And I tend to stay away from some machines because I don't want to look "odd" using them. I am so self conscious of my body all the time and that just gets worse when I'm in a room full of fit people that can do every single machine with ease, while I break a sweat just changing the amount of weights to use. I think this is why so many over-weight people do not go to the gym.
Kids can be cruel, but adults can be just as bad. I had an encounter with a young woman at the gym last night. You could tell she spent a lot of time at the gym because she was so pretty and fit. But while she waited for me to finish with the machine I was using, she kept rolling her eyes and snickering. Maybe it was because I was doing it wrong, or maybe it was because she could have used double the weight I was using, who knows? Well, while waiting and making her sounds, she started to get under my skin, so, I decided to move to another machine and come back when she was finished, but after I cleaned off the machine and moved out of the way for her to use it, she made the remark of, "if you can't fit in the seat, maybe you should try working out at Curves" (a workout facility geared towards bigger women). First instinct........one quick backhand and she'll never know what hit her. But I'm not a violent person and I really like this place and want to be able to come back. So, just as I turned to respond to her with every sarcastic remark that was running through my head, a very handsome, man that was working out on the machine next to us, made a remark., "If you send her to workout at Curves, then we won't have any beautiful, inspirational women to workout with!" WOW.........enough said. I couldn't have come up with a better come back. There was no need for me to respond. I thanked him and walked away with the cheesiest smile I could possibly have.
My point to this story is that too many times we let what other people think of us, dictate what we will allow ourselves to do. People like this woman don't take into consideration that their words could be very detrimental to others. Her words could have easily caused me to gather my things, leave, and never return because everyone there probably thinks the same way or to think, "What's the use in trying. I'm never gonna lose the weight anyway!" But there are people like this gentleman that do honestly care about fitness and not only push themselves, but encourage the people around them to keep going, as well. It helps to have encouraging people around us, but it doesn't do us any good to have them if we don't encourage ourselves. And the one thing we fail to remember is that our biggest supporter is God. He is right there cheering us on and assuring us that he will always bless whatever it is that we do to better ourselves !!!
"What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us?" Romans 8:31
"LET'S DO IT!"
]]>
