Moving Without Being Punished

Every time you have ever moved your body on purpose, it was a consequence.

Go back and check. It was because of something. Because of a photograph, or a comment, or a doctor's remark, or a year that had gone badly. It arrived as the response to a problem, which means it arrived as a penalty, and you have never once in your adult life moved your body for any reason other than to pay something off.

So now the whole category is contaminated. You cannot go for a walk without the walk meaning something. The walk is either a payment or a failure to pay, and there is no third option available, and so most days you do not go.

That is not laziness. That is a completely reasonable refusal to be sentenced again.

Let me put the plain thing first. You have not been careless with any of this. You have served every sentence handed to you, for years, and you have gotten up every time. Somebody who did not care would have gone for the walk and thought nothing of it.

So this page is not going to tell you to move more. That is another sentence in a nicer voice.

I want to show you a verse about what liberty is for, and then I want to hand you back a category.

A contaminated category

Consider what has happened to a whole area of your life.

Moving a body is, in itself, morally neutral. It is a thing bodies do. But every instance of it in your history has been attached to a reason, and the reason has always been a deficiency, and after enough repetitions the act and the accusation became the same object in your mind.

So the accusation is now inside the activity. You cannot do the one without receiving the other, which is why you feel worse after a walk than before it, which is a fact about you that nobody has ever explained.

You have an accusation inside an activity, and no act of moving has ever once been a penalty in itself. Galatians 5:1 says stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a verse about liberty land on something as ordinary as a walk.

And notice what the contamination has cost. Not the exercise. The pleasure. There is a kind of ordinary physical enjoyment that most people have access to, and you have had none of it since you were a child, because every route to it runs through a courtroom.

You have lost the pleasure rather than the discipline, and no ordinary physical enjoyment has ever once been a payment. The written word says be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage, and the Spirit of God is the one who can separate an act from an accusation that has been fused to it for decades.

Called unto liberty

Paul writes it to people who were being pulled back into a system of requirements.

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. (Galatians 5:1, King James Version)

Stand fast in the liberty. He treats freedom as a position to be held rather than a feeling to be waited for.

And the thing he warns against is being entangled again, which means the danger is not a first captivity, it is a return to one. And the returns are usually respectable. Nobody gets pulled back into bondage by something that looks like bondage.

You are being warned about a respectable return, and no yoke has ever once arrived looking like one. Galatians 5 names the danger as re-entanglement rather than as a first capture, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that recognizable in something as small as a plan for a walk.

And read what liberty is for in the verses following. Paul says by love serve one another. Liberty is not for doing nothing. It is for doing things freely, which is a completely different activity from doing the same things under sentence.

You have liberty for doing things freely, and it has never once been liberty for doing nothing. The Spirit of God is the one who makes free action feel different from sentenced action inside the same body, and the written word says stand fast therefore in the liberty.

Move once for no reason

Now the part I came to say, and the phrase for no reason is the whole content.

Move your body once today for no reason at all. Not because of anything. Not to address anything. Not as a start.

Walk to the end of the road and back. Stand in the yard. Put music on in the front room. Whatever is available and whatever you would not mind doing.

Stop when you want to. Stopping early is not a failure, it is a demonstration that no sentence is being served.

You are able to move once with nothing attached, and no movement of yours has ever once had to mean something. The written word says stand fast in the liberty and warns against a return to a yoke, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an unattached act possible where every act has had a reason for decades.

And here is why stopping when you want to is load bearing rather than a kindness. A sentence has a length. If you stop when you like, the thing you just did cannot have been a sentence, because sentences are not left early. Stopping early is the proof.

You have a proof available in stopping early, and no sentence has ever once been able to be left when you felt like it. The Spirit of God is the one who makes one unattached act do what an argument could not, and Galatians 5:1 is the written word underneath it, where liberty is a position to stand in and the danger is going back.