I went to Physical Therapy yesterday and my therapist really ramped up the intensity. Today my brain is broken. Particularly, I can’t do something called a Straight Leg Lift on the side where I had surgery. The description is so straightforward. “Lie on back. Bend one knee. Lift the other leg, keeping it straight, to about a 45º angle, in line with bent knee. Lower leg in a controlled fashion.”

One of my legs has no problem with this (until it gets tired after lots of repetition). The other leg, with its new titanium joint inserted through some cut muscles, cannot do this leg lift easily, but it is an essential exercise. I managed a set of four, but could not do more than two in a second set. My leg would not lift itself for the third time in that set. It was the kind of refusal that might have cleared up if a snake had suddenly appeared. Or not. I couldn’t persuade either my muscles or my brain to make the lift thing happen.

Anyway one of the important things about physical therapy is that even trying and failing exercises the muscles involved, although it has to be real trying. I am sure there’s some deep spiritual lesson here. For example, something about how hard you can be working on conquering sin without making any visible progress.

I had a priest once describe that phenomenon using the metaphor of building a wall against the ocean. He said that waves will flow over the wall for a long time, as you build it, until it’s high enough to stop the waves. He went on to say you have to keep making bricks and adding them to the wall even when discouragement sets in, or you never make progress against sin.

Same here. I have to keep trying to move that dead weight of a leg so that I can create the muscle necessary to lift it.

A different spiritual principle involved here might be that I was a little bit smug. I can almost walk up stairs normally. More normally than I have for a long time. I can stand on my left leg. I can put on my socks which I struggled with even before surgery. (In fact, it’s one of the questions the doctor asks, when determining if you need a new hip — can you bend down far enough to put on socks or tie your shoes?) I’m pretty sure I can walk a fair distance and I’ll be putting that to the test in an airport in a few days. But I can’t do this leg lift and I’m not quite sure what else is being affected by that failure.

I bet my PT person could tell me exactly what else in my body is being affected. I bet a good spiritual director could tell someone the hidden consequences for being unable to keep one’s temper, or eat less, or give up grudges. We can all see obvious consequences of sin, and mostly we work to avoid them. But sometimes we might give up working on a particular sin too soon, unaware of the hidden costs of failure.

And as long as I’m making weird spiritual analogies… here’s another. Every now and then as I exercise my left leg and it gets stronger, my right leg gets very cramped up. It happens because my right leg has been compensating for my left leg for a LONG time. And now that it can give up the burden, sometimes it … doesn’t.

Anyway, Hot Announcement on Friday!

And a random church picture because pictures of people trying to lift their legs didn’t sound appealing to me.