Reset by lifestyle change

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

“Blessed are they who follow the law of the Lord!” (Ps 119,1) This psalm clearly expresses how we can have a reset by going through lifestyle change.

Nowadays, we often hear this prescription from doctors due to the surge of chronic diseases affecting even young people. We cannot deny that there is now a growing trend of chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease and obesity.

And some serious studies today urgently recommend a lifestyle change that would consist of eating a balanced diet, regular exercise, getting enough sleep and stress management. They also recommend quitting smoking and limiting alcohol consumption.

But if this is so insofar as our physical health is concerned, it is more so with regard to our spiritual health. Many are now neglecting their spiritual duties and responsibilities resulting in the weakening of faith with matching effects on our morals.

We need to feel the urgent call to return to God by cultivating habits and practices that nurture our soul and deepen our relation with God. Definitely we have to learn to pray and to meditate if only to enter into the most important dimension of our life that is spiritual and supernatural.

What can also help is to sharpen our sense of mindfulness that would enable us to dominate the many distractions around. Spending time appreciating the beauty of nature that would stir our sense of awe and wonder can aid us to go deeper and beyond appearances of things.

There certainly is a crying need to develop the fundamental virtue of piety. The practices that foster this virtue can cover a lot of things: prayer, sacrifice or mortification, recourse to the sacraments like confession, Holy Mass and communion, visit to the Blessed Sacrament, rosary, examination of conscience, spiritual reading, etc.

They should correspond to all the different aspects and needs of our spiritual life as it impacts on our daily activities and concerns.

They can be described as guideposts in our journey of life full of challenges, problems, pressures and other confusing elements. Or they can offer us the needed respites in our activities, giving us moments to recharge ourselves spiritually so we can maintain a supernatural outlook in life.

They are like home bases in our pilgrimage of life where we can recover our spiritual and moral strength. There we can have God in a more direct and intimate condition.

They are supposed to be vital organic parts of our day that comprise mostly of mundane activities that need to be sanctified and offered to God and to others. Like meals and our sleep, they are supposed to be availed of by us in a most natural and regular way.

We should just flow into them, since in the end all our activities should be oriented toward the ultimate goal of our life, and that is worship of God. These practices should not be considered alien to our daily routine.

This is the task we have to do—developing an attitude of relating everything to God by letting all our activities to lead us to these practices. We just have to find a way, with God’s grace, to cultivate a spiritual hunger or urge for these practices.

What is needed is a certain plan, much like a regimen to which many of us willingly submit when we work out our physical fitness, so that a working and fruitful piety would really take root in our life.

We have to go from the fundamental to the more complex levels of spirituality, from the amateur to the professional, from the beginner’s stage to the veteran’s, until we reach what St. Paul once described as the “fullness of God” to which we are destined. (cfr. Eph 3,19)

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com