Core strength
I ran a half-marathon last October. Let me rephrase. I finished a half-marathon last October. Perfect weather, flat course, great crowd energy. My legs felt great. My asthmatic lungs worked well. And then about mile nine something happened that I had never experienced before.
My core gave up. Core? Abs? Train the legs, the lungs, the heart, and the minds. I did all of that. But it never crossed my mind to train my core until it utterly collapsed. I literally could not stand upright. I couldn’t keep my feet under me for more than a few running paces. So I walked, bent over, hinged at the hips. I looked like I might fall on my face any second. I even texted my husband to help me walk the last mile. I crossed the finish line, but it wasn’t pretty.
What happened to me is not unusual, especially for those of us who are not as young as we once were. As we age, our bodies lose spinal mobility, core muscle strength, and dynamic balance, often leading to falls over time. Additionally, endurance declines. We do not function at 60 the same way we did at 20. The temptation for doctors and therapists is to encourage balance and resistance training for the lower body (hips, legs, ankles, and feet), but a critical element is missing. Granacher et al. found that strengthening the core muscles (abdomen, lower back, psoas, and butt) improved mobility and balance in older adults. They wrote, “The core can be thought of as the kinetic link that facilitates the transfer of torques and angular momentum between the lower and upper extremities” (106). In other words, the core connects the upper body to the lower body and when it is weak, everything suffers.
The reason my body hinged at the hips was not that I wasn’t strong enough, but that my core lacked endurance. My legs were plenty strong, but without the aid of muscular stabilizers in and around my abs, spine, and hips, it didn’t matter. Posture, it turns out, requires training for endurance. It isn’t always the big muscles that determine whether a person finishes a race upright; the endurance of a multitude of small stabilizers holds everything together. When the core is strong and steady, the entire body is able to stay aligned and resist collapse under stress.
Core strength is key to remaining active and balanced for life. But core work can be boring. Planks, knee lifts, and bird-dogs aren’t impressive. No one shares on social media that they did a full minute of dead bug exercise. It’s much more exciting to say, “I’m training for a 10K.” But ignoring the part of the body that holds everything together is a dangerous practice.
It’s much the same for those of us who have been believers and Jesus-followers for decades. We know all the stories. We can recite the Christmas and Easter passages by heart. Our brains are full of Bible verses from years of Vacation Bible School and Sunday School. We know the foundations of our faith. We sigh at the Corinthians, assuming they never grew past a baby food faith (1 Corinthians 3:2). We want meat, and we want it in full.
There are two problems with that idea: pride and endurance. Pride is that monster that says, “You don’t need core exercise; you need to leg press 1,000 pounds.” Of course, at mile ten when the psoas quits, the quads you built are pretty helpless to propel you the rest of the way. Pride says, “You don’t need to study Matthew 1; you need to examine the hermeneutical relevance of how many wise men there were.” You may develop great spiritual quads, but they can’t propel you to love your neighbor as yourself.
The fundamental core of knowing Jesus is not how much we know. Deep study of the Word is good and beneficial. Some of us find it fun to look for connections between sentences written by Paul and their origins in Deuteronomy. Deep dive studies and parsing Hebrew and Greek are beneficial exercises. But without the core strength and endurance that comes with pondering and obeying passages like the greatest commandment (Matthew 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-34; Luke 10:25-28), knowledge eventually collapses into disaffection, arrogance, and even idolatry, as the worship of intellect overshadows Jesus.
When Jesus spoke about the futility of worry he said, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33 ESV). Those same words apply to our spiritual core strength. They point to the ancient words of the Shema in Deuteronomy 6, where loving God with everything we are leads us to love our neighbors well. The greatest commandment, as Jesus pointed out, is central to our walk of faith because it puts God and His loving goodness at the core of who we are.
The core of Christianity is Jesus, incarnate God, crucified, risen, and coming again. His command to love one another is the hinge that separates His followers from the rest of the world. When we meditate on loving God and loving our neighbors, we stabilize our centers. Then, when we do use our minds to explore the depth and breadth of the Bible, we remain balanced and steadfast in the priorities of faith. From this center of loving God and loving others, the Holy Spirit propels us forward toward a crown of righteousness promised to those who long for Jesus above all else.
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