Are You More Focused on Losing Weight Than Losing Sin? Gaining Muscle Than Gaining Grace? Looking Younger or Looking More Like Christ?

While vacationing in Colorado, my wife Lisa and I spent an early evening at the Iron Mountain Hot Springs. We heard a group of women in another pool discussing a surprising number of medical options to keep women looking young (even though none of them were past their mid-thirties). What they did to their faces, injected into their bodies, paid to undergo treatments, and the effort they spent investigating and researching new options (“This is what all the Kardashians are doing now,” one woman opined) astonished us.

As we climbed into another pool, Lisa asked me if I wished she were more into that stuff. “What were you thinking listening to them?”

“All I could think of was William Law’s admonition”—Law was an eighteenth-century Anglican writer. “Women and men should earnestly pursue humility, patience, generosity, faith, compassion, courage, kindness and forgiveness with the same intensity that those in the world pursue wealth, fame, worldly achievement, and physical beauty.”

The deception is that looking like you’re twenty-five when you’re fifty, or fifty when you’re seventy, is somehow worthy of more time and money and attention than growing in Christlikeness, whatever your age may be. But in all honesty, most of us as Christians can fall into seasons where we spend far more time and energy trying to look our best, lower our golf handicap, increase our social-media followers, lose weight, regrow hair, and increase the size of our financial investments far more than we think about growing in humility, surrender, discernment, and patience.

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