“Heading Up High" by Armin van Buuren ft. Kensington, Sunday, August 29, 2021
WHEN YOU'RE HOLDING ONTO ALL THAT YOU CAN'T BE. After months of neglecting his physical health, Allan decided to start spending his lunch break at the health club in his apartment complex. The grueling 7-10 gave him a lengthy lunch break which he had spent preparing lessons and waiting for the next class to start. But a lot was going to change for Allan. First, he would start treating his workplace as a job rather than a mission. He had known that the head office was all about profit for quite some time, but he had placed his hope in the local. He loved the city he had spent two years in. He had bonded with his students, church members, and staff at the institute. However, the local was letting him down too. Pastor Shim had made it clear: he was interested in money. The spiritual component was a gimmick. Allan understood this as self preservation. He too would start practicing self-preservation. He was young and well dressed. He was collecting a paycheck he had no time to spend, so most of it was going to student loans. He lived on convenience store breakfasts after his 7 am class finished and rushed dinners--kimbap, ddukpoki, or something he could scarf down during one of his ten-minute breaks in the evening. Lunch was usually the meal he enjoyed, but he would cut that time short for exercise. After his class ended at 11, he walked home and changed. The summer was ending, so that meant he could wear the same shirt for the afternoon classes.
IT'S A LONG WAY DOWN. Unbuttoning his checkered green shirt, he looked at his body in the mirror. He had only ever kept a doddering workout routine. Those sticky-paged magazines he had in high school with the men who were jacked had given him tips and he started to work out. He threw them away, though, when he the pang of spiritual guilt told him to remove all stumbling blocks. "If your right hand causes you to sin," though Josh was left handed, and come to think of it many had become left handed in since the Internet had gotten faster. Josh thought that even if he plucked out his eyes and cut off both hands, he would find a way to sin. Those images would be forever burned into his brain and he could recall them whenever he wanted. Health, for Adventists, was practical, never sexy. It was supposed to make you live like his great-grandfather had until 100, expecting to see the return of Jesus. As a young man, you were supposed to be humble like Jesus and look humble too. Jesus "had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him" (Isaiah 53:2 NIV). Josh's priorities had been achievements, first his music, his degree, and then his teaching. A trip to the gym was too time consuming, too selfish. But in the mirror he saw his skinny-fat body was was nothing to be desired. A patch of chest hair, acne scaring on his back, hunched shoulders. He thought about his great-grandfather, what he looked like before he died. The smell of the green smoothies he drank daily and the drool coming from his chin convinced Josh that he didn't want to give up everything fun and watch his friends die as he approached the 22nd century. He changed into a pair of shorts that almost covered his knees and a loose t-shirt and headed off to the gym, hoping to see the man in the tight squat shorts.
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