This one comes to us from Scott Dalton.
Scott, you can still close all 3 [fitness] rings today. Go for a brisk, 40-minute walk, and be sure to stand and move a bit each hour.”
“All three of your [fitness] rings are usually farther along by now. You’ve got time to get back on track.”
No, these are not motivational lines from my personal trainer. Nope, they are not lines from the inside of a Dove chocolate. These are two of the mostly hilarious reminders that I get from my Apple Watch on days that I forget (read: don’t want to) work out. My favorite fun fact about the first quote is that I got that notification on my wrist at 10:11 PM on a Monday. Who goes on a 40-minute walk at 10:11 PM on a Monday? Seriously, what is that?
The reason I got the Apple Watch in the first place was that I wanted to be able track how far I was swimming. For the first few weeks, I would slap on the water wings and do a few laps at my local pool and enjoy this admittedly cool feature of the watch. For a while, the watch and I existed in bliss; I was working out, and the watch was tracking all of the data. Soon after I (basically) quit swimming, the watch was still there giving me these debatably passive aggressive reminders that I had not achieved whatever my “fitness goal” was for that day. Some days I would forget to stand for enough minutes each hour, other days I failed to exercise long enough, and still other days I wouldn’t burn enough calories even if I worked out for the right amount of time.
At first, I would get really disappointed in myself for not meeting my fitness “goals.” I mean, c’mon, the watch was still in factory setting. That means that I was supposed to do as much exercise as what Apple deems “average” for Americans. In short, the Apple Watch was telling me that I was less than average, and it was reminding me regularly of my less-than-averageness.
At this juncture in my relationship with the Apple Watch, I had a decision to make: I could either accept that the Watch’s standard is far superior to anything I could ever expect from myself (without steroids…which I considered) or I could be perennially frustrated by my lack of initiative to workout every six minutes.
A few days into my fierce struggle accepting my own mediocrity, a breakthrough happened. I was on one of those party-barge booze cruises celebrating a couple that was getting married (great day-before-the-wedding idea, by the way) when a guy that I would describe as a casual acquaintance, at best, approached me.
“Hey man,” he asked, “what do you have under that shirt?” To say I was confused by his question is a gross understatement.
“I’m asking, do you have a six-pack like the other dudes on this boat?”
I looked down and blurted out, before thinking, “Heck no! I’m hoping for a one-pack some day.”
“Thank God. I was starting to think there was something wrong with me. Have these guys ever had a carb?”
I began to laugh far more than was acceptable for that joke. In that moment, I realized that the whole pursuit of the vote of acceptance by the Apple Watch was an absurd and hilarious attempt.
I cannot do it! I cannot achieve the Apple Watch’s standard of perfection! I’m going to type that again: I cannot do it! (It feels good to write).
As I thought more about that interaction, I realized that this kind of laughter is what the law should elicit from a person who is honest about their estate. The Apple Watch used to make me angry instead of make me laugh because I used to think that the goal was achievable — there was a chance that I could do it. Maybe 40 minutes could be brisk after all! Except that 40 minutes has never been brisk. Forty minutes in the right environment can be a total slog of a walk — especially at 10:11 PM. That’s not achievable; that’s just hilarious and probably insane.
In the same way, it causes me to take a serious pause at my initial response to the Law of God. If I think on it, my approach is almost exclusively to grit my teeth and think of some reasonable way to “achieve” — with lots of explanation and technicalities — whatever has been set before me. If I were truly honest, I might simply laugh and come to the feet of Jesus asking for help and for forgiveness, praising him because he lived, died, and rose for people like me. People like me are people who need saving: we cannot do it.
Jesus comes for people who need saving from the crushing expectation of the law. He may not have had an Apple Watch, but he carried the Law of God, which incidentally, is infinitely harder than burning 300 calories a day. Jesus, knowing our inability to keep even the little “l” laws that we make up for ourselves, came to do staggering work that displays a commitment beyond anything the world has ever seen. He was so committed to people who couldn’t “do” the law that he died for them and gave them his spotless record.
And that, in a certain way, is laughable — not because of what Jesus did — but because he did it all for you and for me.
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