1 John 2:3-6
One of the great benefits of turning 50 is that your doctor begins looking at you differently. No longer are you that younger person who has little or nothing to worry about when it comes to health. Now that you’ve hit the magic number of Five O, you need a whole bunch of tests. So over the past couple of years, I’ve been through a lot of them. You may have experienced some of these.
There is the basic blood test where you have to go to a lab and have some medical person draw out blood from your body with a needle. That’s fine as long as needles don’t bother you. But I have a thing about needles. I just about fainted one time when getting immunized to go to Africa. So I don’t like them. I don’t even look when they are putting the needle in. It also doesn’t help when someone approaches you with a needle 7 meters long and says “I’m going to draw your blood.”
Another time, my doctor concluded I needed a stress test. Now you’d think with a stress test that the goal would be to reduce the stress in the patient’s life. But is that what they do in a stress test? Oh no. It’s all about putting your body under a great amount of physical stress to see what you and your heart can tolerate. So I love it when I’m kind of dying on the tread mill and the doctor says “keep going, keep going.”
And of course, you need to keep active when you’re fifty or else apparently the body just blows apart. So I think it was a couple winters ago, I signed up for 12 personal training sessions. Now this might have been a good decision if personal trainers weren’t inherently evil and enjoyed seeing others suffer. But I didn’t know that. It was like I lived in the middle ages. And I heard that the town torturer had some new racks to try. So I volunteer to test the effectiveness of the racks. Yeah, I want to experience that. During my torture sessions at the fitness center, prospective members would pass by touring the facility for the first time. I was tempted to shout out – “Don’t do it. They’re out to kill you.” One time I actually failed to complete one of the exercises. My arm just gave out. My trainer was pleased that she had pushed me to the point of failure.
