What Are You Measuring?

When God cares more about the condition of your heart than the number on your scale—and why both matter.

As a health coach and personal trainer, when working with someone new, it’s important that I know where a person’s current health stands. Internal health metrics like the diagnosis of diabetes or high cholesterol, blood sugar, and hormone levels (if known) are always key areas of interest to me. Then the assessment of their health ability, like how well they can perform activities requiring endurance, strength, and flexibility. And finally, the thing of least importance to me, but often understandably most important to them, is assessing their external body measurements like body weight, body fat, and muscle % (if possible), as well as waist and hip measurements.

To help a person get to where they want to go, it’s important to know where they are; otherwise, how will we know when progress is being made?

I’m a girl of progress! I resist spinning in circles. As much as I teach, preach, and lead from my guts and my heart, I love me some data to show progress is occurring.

In the natural realm, if we want to know where we are and if we are getting to where we want to go, tests are needed. An eighth grader doesn’t graduate and go to high school unless their test results from their eighth-grade year prove they are ready.

I love how God has designed our physical lives to mirror His spiritual reality.

After the moment we believe in our heart and confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord, we spend the rest of our lives seeking to understand God. What’s on His mind and how He wants to make His Kingdom come to earth, through us.

For God’s Kingdom to come to earth through us, our hearts need tests to measure the size of our faith.

Jesus’s twelve closest friends understood testing.

“When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea, to get into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum. It was dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. The sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing. When they had rowed about three to four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea…” John 6:16-18

Jesus and his posse of twelve had just left the place where two fish and five loaves, about the amount needed to make maybe a dozen tuna sandwiches, were able to feed not just 5,000 people but even more. Commentators agree that the number was probably closer to 15,000-20,000 people, since women and children weren’t accounted for in those times.

My gosh! Take a moment to close your eyes and picture that ridiculous need.

For scale: Capital One Arena, in Washington D.C. holds 20,000 people. Imagine the reality of this impossibility Jesus tested His disciples with.

At this feeding of 5,000+, the disciples were tested, and they didn’t pass.

They didn’t come through; Jesus did.

Jesus took the little in His hands, looked up to heaven, gave thanks, broke the bread and the food kept coming.

By the end of the day, Jesus puts them in a boat and tells them to go to the other side.

I read through all the accounts of this story in the gospels and noticed no one ever asked or insisted Jesus stay with them and get in the boat. Perhaps they were riding high from being a part of something so heroic. Maybe they were a little punch drunk from being the hosts of such an epic party. After all, it was a remarkable miracle of multiplication, unlike anything seen since.

Puffed up with pride, they walked with a bounce in their step down to the boat, eagerly counting the days until they would conquer the Romans and rule the world.

At least they obeyed and got in the boat, but we all know how easy it is to obey when things seem to be going our way.

What started as a peaceful entry into the seas didn’t stay that way. As waves began to crash on the boat and threaten their lives, they kept rowing. Jesus’s friends rowed for three to four miles, which would have been equal to rowing a boat in a life-threatening storm for six to eight hours.

Since trauma can be defined as any moment that felt life-threatening, this traumatic moment for Jesus’s closest friends lasted six to eight hours.

Once again, my reader who is frustrated with God because you’re doing all the things and not encountering change, think about how drastically Jesus’s closest friends were tested. They thought they were going to die. With their lives threatened, they must have felt abandoned and turned over to complete physical, emotional, and mental misery for six to eight hours! Certainly their nervous systems were cooked!

Amédée Varin - Christ Marchant sur la Mer, 19th century painting of Jesus Christ walking on water, French Art, ca. 1850

Why would Jesus take them from experiencing something so good, like throwing an epic miracle-making banquet feast, to fearing for their lives?

Mark’s account of this boating event records something interesting.

“And he got into the boat with them, and the wind ceased. And they were utterly astounded, for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened.” Mark 6:51-52

The ones who spent the most time with Jesus, had personal access to Jesus, heard the most teachings of Jesus, watched and recorded the miracles of Jesus, and had just hours earlier doled out tuna sandwiches for more than 15,000 people, then collected leftovers, had hard hearts.

When we think of hard hearts, we tend to think of someone in active rebellion. But biblically, to have a hard heart also means being slow to comprehend.

“for they did not understand about the loaves”

They witnessed a miracle; they liked the power of the miracle, but they were slow to comprehend the heart of God behind the miracle.

A test was needed for understanding God’s heart.

In the beginning, with our free will, we disobeyed God. We ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil when the tree of life was ours for the taking. When sin entered, the craving for the taste of knowledge stayed on our tongues. We are fools who think if we can understand God, if we can know what He is up to, why He does what He does, and when He will do what we want Him to do, THEN we can trust God. Then we will feel safe enough to worship Him with all of who we are.

Trying to comprehend what God is doing ruptures relationship with God. But we always have access to the why. The why behind His what is Love.

Fools tend to focus on getting God’s hand to move rather than what moves the heart of God.

If you feel like you’re doing all the right things for a better life through improved health and the scale is not moving, the math is not mathing, and you’re tempted to think God is not at work, I encourage you to test your heart by considering a couple things:

1. Reflect on how you got in the boat: Did Jesus lead you into this storm? If you can look back and say, “God, I followed you into this storm. You asked me to ____(enter the new thing you’re doing)_____ and I am doing it and nothing about this feels good nor am I seeing positive change.” You may feel like God called you and then left you, but friend, keep rowing! You’re closer to reaching “the other side”. You’re closer than you could ever be, standing safely in your comfort zone, on the starting line shore.

Keep rowing!

Unlike the disciples who had yet to receive the Holy Spirit that turned them into ordinary men doing extraordinary things, willing to die for Love, the Holy Spirit that did that transformed them post-traumatic boat moment, is now in you. If He told you to get in the boat, don’t give up, He will come! Your faithfulness pleases his heart. At the proper time He will come to you. Don’t give up on thinking, feeling, and choosing what Love said to do.

Keep rowing!

If God didn’t ask you to do it. Stop now!

If God asked you to do it. Row! Row! Row!

The flesh that prefers hosting the world’s best party over following Jesus into a storm needs to understand the heart of God. The understanding is in the test.

Fear Not, It Is I by George Cocoo

Keep a Captain’s log: We can’t change what we can’t measure.

Remember those assessments I talked about at the beginning. When I have clients who feel like giving up because they aren’t seeing the number under their feet change, I have them account for the change they can feel. More energy? Better sleep? Mental clarity? The good feeling of agency and exercised self-control? Clothes fitting a little more comfortably? All of these are evidence that good seed is growing. Fruit will eventually come if the tree of faith gets watered. And water is water whether from a storm or a light sprinkle of rain.

Patience, time, and perseverance are the proving ground of those called by faith. If it’s a faith call, God will be faithful. Keep your emotions in check when it comes to numbers.

As the leader of an international non-profit with all kinds of income and expenses to be accounted for, sometimes the numbers and the math feel overwhelming. My husband, a cerebral engineer, once told me, his very emotionally in-touch wife, “Alisa, numbers don’t have feelings.” He was reminding me that measurements are just information. Good leaders use measurements as information, not identity.

For example, if a woman I’m coaching wants to step on the scale to see if theres measurable progress, before she does that I ask her to write down and send to me the improvements she’s been noticing that have nothing to do with the scale, how those choices she’s making are connected to who she wants to become as a person, and rate how much value they are to her on a scale of 1-10. Then, after that, if she wants to step on a scale, cool! It can be useful information, but if the storm cloud of doubt rolls in because she’s not seeing what she hoped to see, we have her Captain’s log to keep us on course to who she is becoming in Christ. She does not fear, keeps her peace and passes the test.

Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid. -Matthew 14:27

2. Are you trying to improve your health but prone to feeling a little sea sick about your weight? I created this Captains Log for you. Click this link and I’ll send you a copy.

May you know peace in all storms,

Alisa

Become a voice for the Gospel in the world of health and wellness! Next class of Revelation Wellness Instructor/ Health Coach training begins August 18th. Sign ups close August 14th. This disceipleship training school only happens once a year. Don’t miss!