Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: Sport or Fitness (02/15/07)
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TITLE: Not Fit to Serve? | Previous Challenge Entry
By LINDA GERMAIN
02/22/07 -
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Question: What does PCPFS mean?
Give up?
Answer: President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports
In response to learning that European children were more physically fit than American children, on July 16, l956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower established The President’s Council on Youth Fitness. In 1963, President John Kennedy changed the name to reflect a need for all Americans to embrace a goal of better health. In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson went even further in broadening its mission and changed the name to President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.
With all the attendant publicity and focus on a plethora of programs for ages from one to a hundred-and-one, it seems reasonable the USA would be glowing with so much health we could generate our own electricity --not! There’s many a slip twixt cup and lip is an old saying that speaks volumes on this subject.
Now, over 50 years later, and with the Council still going strong, this nation, as a whole, is in worse physical shape than ever. The media blasts the evidence of our desperate need day and night. Every seller of diet plans, pills, and exercise equipment is reaching greedy hands into our elastic-waist pants pockets. We have become a sickly nation of whipped and stuffed couch potatoes. Drugged by excess, we seem oblivious to the consequences as we drop dead from heart disease, diabetes, and all those other different strokes for different folks.
That isn’t to say there aren’t a few hardy souls working out in gyms and dashing madly along roadsides and through parks or riding stationery bikes for thousands of miles to nowhere. There is a new trend to participate in liposuction or other surgical procedures that reshape our compromised structures as a last resort to reclaim a spark of vigor and physical wholeness; but, the sad, sad truth is…so what?
If every single human on planet earth toed the fitness line, if we all could run marathons, bench press, squat, jump jacks and dance for days, none of it would do one drop of good for our eternal lives. All bodies, even beautiful and robust ones, eventually stop breathing and return to dust. Every one of us is sitting in the waiting room of physical death anticipating or dreading to be called for that last appointment.
There is no national Council on Spiritual Fitness, the one thing we need the most to save our pitiful selves. The airwaves may have a token of missionary voices crying in the black-hearted wilderness-- and thank the Lord for the ones who are doing so from a pure motive to rescue the dying -- but the response to righteousness is not overwhelming at this time. The constant bombardment of medical facts and pleas to take steps to preserve the masses of protoplasm in which we reside is ricocheting from towers and satellites and bouncing off of deaf ears. The TRUTH about our unclean and unfit spirits is but a whimper in a cacophony of worldly distracting noises bidding for our attention.
God’s Gym promises better results than all the push-ups, lunges, and aerobic frenzy and running in place we can do. In the discipline of spiritual workouts, we reap more benefits in the short term and certainly in the forever. That glorious labor in the Lord’s vineyard will ensure a more heavenly body in the sweet by and by for sure, but consuming His daily bread and obeying his instructions also will yield a healthier here and now.
Christians learn from Scripture that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. There is no doubt that humans the world over would benefit from an informed and healthier lifestyle. I applaud the efforts of PCPFS to stem the tide of sickness and disease in our flesh. That is an ideal, a utopian premise, but without embracing Spiritual fitness, on judgment day, all that worshipping at the altar of the physical will be as worthless as filthy rags.
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And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? (Matthew 16:26 NLT).
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