Building up resistance

By Daniel Francis

Whoever said walking in faith and living a good life were easy lied. Truth be told, I don’t think I ever heard anyone outrightly say that to begin with. I, like so many others, grapple with staying on the right path: going without sin, keeping up with the faith rituals, etc.

Sometimes, for me, it feels like an inevitable countdown until I make a misstep. For example, it’s been 40 days without sin, whoops, now we are back down to zero. Thinking about it in this way puts a lot of pressure on my faith journey, so I have been trying to explore different ways to view things.

In January, I took a trip to the United States. Now, mistake number one was forgetting that my Caribbean DNA is very allergic to cold weather. So, the minute I stepped out of the airport, I realised I had set myself up to suffer.

I was never very interested in snow and all the cold-weather fun because, to me, combining cold weather and fun seems like an oxymoron. To each their own. To add insult to injury, the city I was in experienced one of the worst snowstorms in several years. On the worst night, temperatures dropped to -18˚ Celsius. My luck, right? All in all, I was very cold and miserable for a few days.

I recall the most difficult period of the day, besides venturing outside, was when it was time to take a shower. I have never understood people who crank the water temperature all the way up to the hottest setting until this visit. Yet, the experience of exiting the shower and stepping onto the cold, tiled floor and having all the heat immediately drained from my body was to me the worst torture I had to routinely experience.

I would, in fact, stay held up in the shower for longer than I should just to prolong having to get out and experience that tundra of cold as I dry off and dress.

Something curious and unexpected happened over time. It got easier for me to brave that post-shower cold as the days passed by. It was like my body was creating this resistance to the cold, enough to get to a point where I could get out of the shower with ease.

Mentally, I would also tell myself, “Hey, you have to do this, so might as well pretend it’s warmer than it actually is.” I don’t know if that thought sinking in made a difference, but something gave way.

Yet, I would always think negatively about how cold I would be as I jumped out of the shower, and I’m certain that made the experience worse than it needed to be.

Similarly, when I took this countdown approach I mentioned earlier, it was as though I was counting down the days until my next infraction. I have been switching my mindset of late to focus on the positive, how much I have grown, and the resistance I have built up when it comes to my faith journey, and it has made a huge difference.

A shift towards the positive produces a whole new perspective that reinforces why you are on this journey of faith and how important it is. So, although I will not be braving any snowstorms again any time soon, I will be building my resistance to sin and the wrong path by focusing on the positive: ultimately focusing more on God.

Daniel Francis, author of The Millennial Mind, The Millennial Experience, and How to Write and Self-Publish Your Book, is an entrepreneur passionate about leadership and storytelling. As a leadership development coach at Rebit Limited, he has spent the last four years equipping individuals to thrive personally and professionally.

He also leads One Momentum Publishing, a hybrid publishing company through which he has guided hundreds of authors on their journey from idea to published book.

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