When Something Isn’t Better Than Nothing

It doesn’t matter if you are late to my classes, online or in the club. My focus isn’t ruined by your tardiness, and I tell people all the time that, “Something is always better than nothing.” In the physical realm this is true. If you don’t have an hour, then exercise for 20 minutes. As long as you do a few longer workouts here and there, you’ll probably be fine. But the spiritual realm of our faith isn’t like that.

In his amazing book Crazy Love, Francis Chan asks a tough question. “Can we follow our own course while still calling ourselves followers … So can we join the Marines, so to speak, without having to do all the work?” If you grew up in a rigid religion, then the notion of faith might seem very similar to the military, but Semper Fidelis means “always faithful.” Chan goes on to say, “God doesn’t just want us to have good theology. He wants us to know him and love him.”

As a preacher and evangelist, Chan gets questions all the time about how far people can go, how long they can hang onto their habits and still get into heaven. “To me, these questions are tragic because they reveal much about the state of our hearts. They demonstrate that our concern is more about going to heaven than loving…”

I do this. The spiritual journey, my path, my Yoga of Devotion  – or Bhakti Yoga – sometimes seems to ask too much of me. I am a wife, mother, fitness entrepreneur … If I am exhausted at the end of the day and only mutter a quick prayer as I nod off to sleep, isn’t The Divine wise and gracious enough to accept that that’s all I have to give on some days? I will conclude with the following paragraph that caused me to stop pedaling as I read it while exercising on my recumbent (while my kids watched Dora Explorer upstairs… 🙂

“When we put it plainly like this – as a direct choice between God and our stuff – most of us hope we would choose God. But we need to realize that how we spend our time, what our money goes toward, and where we will invest our energy is equivalent to choosing God or rejecting him. How could we think for even a second that something on this puny little earth compares to the Creator and Sustainer and Savior of it all?”

Something isn’t better than nothing when God gave us everything: the breath of life, teacher, prophets, his own Son on a cross, heaven… Can I not give my every asana, my every prayer, my every dream in return?