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When was the last time you intentionally ran? I don’t mean the times you run after your toddler or your dog, or the times you run for the bus or to get out of the rain—I mean intentional running? Intentional—meaning, a time when you purposely made the effort to endure the aching anguish of running because it is good for you. You see, personally, I used to love running, but now I have a love-hate relationship with it. When I used to run (because it comes and goes like the seasons), I would run 7–8km every day and though I would find it boring, painful and tiring, I would keep doing it.  I also realised that the more I ran and the more calories I burned, the more careful I was about the food I ate. As a matter of fact, I noticed that when I used to run every morning, I was very careful with what I put in my mouth, not only careful, but I would read and calculate every single calorie that was going into my body.

Let me give you an example. Many moons ago, I ran and walked a combined distance of 12km. Later that same day as I was driving around, I was feeling very hungry and I hadn’t packed any lunch, so I made my way to an area with a variety of food options. As I got out of the car there was one food item—and only one food item—that got my attention and that was the perfectly cut-straight, out of the wood fire oven pizza slices, ready for me to buy them. But first I googled how many calories were in one slice of cheese pizza. I thought to myself maybe 100–150 calories. However, to my surprise, a slice of pizza this big was more like 450-500 calories. A slice of pizza can have 500 calories! “How can exercise burn off such a little amount of calories and how could great tasting food like pizza have so many calories”, I said to myself. Putting the unhealthy pizza sample aside, I also asked myself, “why is it easier to consume calories than it is to burn them?”  Because our bodies love calories, we need calories to live, that’s why we crave food. That’s why you crave that donut, that chocolate, that burger, those chips or that salad. It shows that just one calorie goes a long way and for those who exercise, you know how hard it is to burn 1 calorie let alone 500 of them. Food can power us to run and run for a very long time but it also gives us life.

For the follower of Jesus there’s more to life than physical food, there’s also the spiritual food we need every single day to survive. We need God’s Word to live. The more we read of Jesus’ story in the Bible, the more we are going to crave it. It is God’s Word that gives us the power to live. So next time you feel the slightest desire to read the Word, don’t put it off to another time, take advantage of that craving and read the words of life—the more you read, the more you will crave and the more you crave the more you will be fed by the powerful words of life in the Bible.

Psalm 119:103- “How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!”