I was looking at the day we are up to, 51, and thinking about how hard things get after a certain age. I turned 51 last March 17. Age has stopped bothering me so it didn’t make any difference after all the length of our lives were determined by God before we were born, so I have little control over how long a life I have only how I live it. But living a good life is important. We want emotional, relational, spiritual and physical health; all of these are about the choices we make.
Let’s take a look at each of these. Our spiritual health has everything to do with the choices we make about God. There are many of these. We need to choose who God is, what he is and how powerful he is. And these choices are not building God the way we want him to be. The choice is, believing in a God who is, was and will be always the same. You can’t make your own God. Your choice is to believe in the one who is. As you grow in that relationship your spiritual health will grow as well.
Emotional health also relies on the choices we make. We need to make healthy choices of how we see ourselves. This is especially hard if we have ever been in a relationship of any kind that tore us down. If we choose to believe the negative stuff that others have said about us, or put negative ideas in our own heads and own those ideas, our emotional health will die. I am not saying to think too much about ourselves. What needs to be done is to have a realistic healthy view of ourselves, we need to fix what is wrong and continue to work out our lives. This is challenging, but ultimately it can be done.
Relational health deals with how we treat and are treated by the others in our lives. This depends on both of you to make the right choices. See people as they really are and don’t push them to be what you think they should. Help them instead to realize their own potential. In other words a good relationship is about two people trying to help each other meet their goals. If you have friend that is truly interested in you, treasure them and treat them in the same way.
Physical health is all about choices. We choose what to eat and how much of it to eat. We choose whether to exercise or not. We choose the hours we keep and the company we keep. These are all choices that will affect our physical health. As we get older and are looking to change the choices can get harder and may be more radical, as our bodies are beginning to slow down. This doesn’t mean we can’t do it, it just means we need to be more determined and more deliberate in every choice we make. But WE CAN DO IT!
