I happened to watch a special episode of the television show The Biggest Loser that took a look at former contestants and gave an update on how they have been doing since their season ended. If you haven’t heard of the show, it is basically a weight-loss competition (you can read more about the show on the Wikipedia page here).
During the special, one of the trainers visited a contestant who had won his season but had since put back almost all of the weight he had lost. The former contestant confessed that he had a hard time preparing himself for the extreme exercise regimen that it would require for him to lose all that weight a second time. Presumably he had been re-playing in his mind the intense workouts that he had gone through every day for several weeks during his time on the show.
But his former trainer explained that he had already gone through the extreme training, and now that he was back to his regular life, he had to find a routine that would work for him every day. I realized that this was very good advice, and not just for people who had been on The Biggest Loser. It’s also good advice for anyone who has ever attended an extended church seminar or convocation.
Like contestants on the show, we live away from home among other people who are going through the same schedule we are, and we live a life that is very different from our daily lives. We don’t go to school or work, but spend time in classes and in prayer so that we can draw closer to God. While we are there, we experience great joy and spiritual fulfillment through the long prayers and fellowship with brothers and sisters. And when it’s over, we have high hopes of continuing our renewed spirituality at home.
Yet we often drop off quickly once we get back home and are back to our regular lives, and then we get stuck in a cycle of highs at SSC and NYTS and lows in-between. But how do we fix this? We need to understand that we shouldn’t expect to feel the exact level of spiritual highs that we find at seminars because when we are at home we are not able to spend the same amount of time in prayer or the same amount of time studying the Bible and listening to classes on the Bible. We need to figure out a way to maintain our faith within our daily lives.
It’s important to schedule our prayers and Bible study in a way that we can maintain them every day and keep ourselves close to God. That means it’s not enough to skim through a Bible chapter and pray for 5 minutes a day. We need to spend quality time in studying a chapter and meditating on it, and praying long enough so that we feel truly filled with the Holy Spirit. While the specifics of how we cultivate our spirituality will vary, what matters is establishing a routine that we can maintain long term. Instead of dreading our spiritual cultivation or giving up on it because of unrealistic expectations, we should find a way to incorporate it into our life so that we grow in faith not only during special church events but every day.