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Who’s the most dominant American individual in the history of the Summer Olympics?
Sportscaster Mike Greenberg teases that question in Got Your Answers, a book that endeavors to settle “the top 100 greatest sports arguments.”
Track and field superstar Carl Lewis comes to mind. So does gymnast Simone Biles. How about diver Greg Louganis or heptathlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee?
In truth, it’s not even close. The runaway winner has to be swimmer Michael Phelps. Greenberg points out that no other two Olympians in history have combined to win as many gold medals as Phelps won all by himself (23, to be exact).
How do you fuel your body sufficiently to keep racing up and down the pool, setting world records along the way?
The answer is that you eat. A lot. According to Olympics.com, Phelps consumed something like 10,000 calories every day during the Beijing Olympics in 2008:
For breakfast, he had three fried egg sandwiches, with cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, fried onions and mayonnaise, followed by three chocolate-chip pancakes…followed by a five-egg omelet, three sugar-coated slices of French toast, a bowl of grits, and two cups of coffee… For lunch, he would have a half-kilogram of pasta, two large ham and cheese sandwiches on white bread smothered with mayonnaise, and another set of energy drinks. For dinner, add a pound of pasta with carbonara sauce, a large pizza, and energy drinks.
Incredibly, his body fat hovered somewhere around 8 percent. Wouldn’t it be great to eat like Michael Phelps? Actually, nothing’s standing in your way – as long as you manage, like Phelps, to burn 1,000 calories per hour in your activity of choice.
How do you fuel your spirit sufficiently to walk with God in the midst of every imaginable circumstance?
The answer is that you eat. A lot.
A disciple’s diet involves considerably less mayonnaise while majoring on servings of God’s Word.
The Bible, in fact, is portrayed as a “consumable” in a surprising number of texts. It is described as milk (I Peter 2:2), honey (Psalm 19:10), and meat (Hebrews 5:12). The prophet Jeremiah declared, “Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart” (Jeremiah 15:16). When tempted in the wilderness to transform stones into bread, a famished Jesus insisted that “people don’t live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4).
Then there’s Psalm 1, which serves as the thematic doorway to the entire Old Testament collection of 150 psalms.
Blessed is the one
Who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked
Or stand in the way of sinners
Or sit in the seat of mockers.
But his delight is in the law of the Lord
And on his law he meditates day and night.
That person is like a tree planted by streams of water
Which yields its fruit in season
And whose leaf does not wither.
Whatever that person does prospers.
(Psalm 1:1-3)
According to these words, there is a particular set of conditions by which life will go very well for us.
The person who pursues God must relentlessly meditate on God’s Word.
The verb we customarily translate “meditate” has several interesting meanings in the original Hebrew. One conveys the idea of muttering. During the pre-literary era – centuries before individuals had the luxury of carrying around a private copy of Scripture – people memorized vast portions of the Bible. During Jesus’ time, for instance, it would not have been unusual for a child to commit all 150 psalms to memory. People would habitually speak the Bible’s promises, warnings, and teachings aloud, under their breath, as a never-ending recitation.
Over time, people would discover that those verses might become a kind of “home base” for their minds.
But ours is no longer a speech-centered culture. Muttering has lost a bit of its edge. It might be best not to mutter, for instance, when one is going through airport security.
The same Hebrew verb, however, also connotes chewing – working out the meaning of what God has conveyed to us through a kind of spiritual rumination. The secret to caring for our souls is to keep God before our minds as often as we can by consuming generous portions of God’s Word.
What do people tend to think about?
Our thoughts inevitably circle around what we judge to be vitally important – perhaps our suddenly fading investment portfolios, or getting payback for past hurts, or standing strong in the midst of chaos, or showing up those snobs who disrespected us, or winning the big contract or the big game. God has made us in such a way that our minds inevitably linger on what we value.
It’s possible to live for eight or nine decades in the midst of Western culture, and even be deemed a highly successful person, yet never stop to think about God for any notable length of time. This is called blowing the opportunity of a lifetime.
Psalm 1 declares, “Choose to treasure God by continually turning your mind to the things that God values. Do this by chewing on God’s Word. Then you will flourish like a healthy, well-watered tree.”
In the parched environment of the Middle East, water has always been a dealbreaker. Access to water is the difference between life and death. The psalmist knew that the only tree that realistically had a shot at long-term survival was the one that had the good fortune of being planted by a flowing stream.
Here’s the wonderful news: You are not a tree.
God has given each of us the freedom to decide where we will plant our minds this spring.
Will you park yourself in front of the TV? Bury yourself in office projects? Devote your best efforts to a video game? Forget your anxieties on the pages of detective novels? Or numb yourself through a mindless addiction?
Choose wisely.
God promises that if we routinely feast on the nourishment of his Word, our lives will flourish.
And as Michael Phelps would be the first to remind us, the only way we’ll ever find out if the “water’s fine” is by deciding to jump in.