{"id":1712,"date":"2022-06-10T08:24:24","date_gmt":"2022-06-10T12:24:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=1712"},"modified":"2022-06-10T08:24:24","modified_gmt":"2022-06-10T12:24:24","slug":"a-better-wake-up-call","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2022\/06\/10\/a-better-wake-up-call\/","title":{"rendered":"A Better Wake-Up Call"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Do you occasionally sleep past your designated wake-up time?
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Maybe 255 volts will help your feet find the floor.
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That\u2019s the thinking behind Pavlok, the fitness band that (according to its website) helps you \u201cwear your willpower\u201d and \u201cform good habits.\u201d\u00a0 Or, as others have suggested, Pavlok is like a Fitbit that hates you.\u00a0
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For around $175 you can shock yourself into a better life.\u00a0 After you program your desired daily patterns into Pavlok, the wristband will watch over you like a hawk.\u00a0 If you skip your workout or take shortcuts at the gym, brace yourself for a jolt of electricity.\u00a0 If you set the wake-up function on your device to Jumping Jack mode, the alarm will keep going off until you start doing jumping jacks.\u00a0
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But Pavlok is just getting started.\u00a0
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Maybe pain isn\u2019t your prime motivator.\u00a0 How about shame?\u00a0 Pavlok will actually post a message to your Facebook page that you\u2019ve been cheating on your personal fitness goals.\u00a0 There\u2019s no truth to the rumor that Pavlok secretly went to seminary and majored in preaching.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
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Pavlok is based on aversion science \u2013 a fancy way of saying that people will be motivated to stop doing whatever brings punishment.\u00a0 It\u2019s also an example of classic respondent conditioning.
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Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?<\/em>
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The Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov conducted a famous series of experiments with dogs.\u00a0 He sounded a bell while they ate.\u00a0 The dogs quickly associated the ringing with dinner.\u00a0 Afterwards Pavlov noticed that when he rang the bell the dogs immediately began salivating.
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Wouldn\u2019t it be great if we could train ourselves, through some form of behavioral conditioning, to do the things we\u2019ve always wanted to do and to stop doing the things we\u2019d love to leave behind?
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It\u2019s been tried many times before.
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During several periods of church history, uber-committed followers of Jesus have devoted themselves to radical programs of self-discipline \u2013 rigorous spiritual \u201cworkouts\u201d that were designed to eliminate any possibility of yielding to the temptations of the world.\u00a0
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In his book The Spirit of the Disciplines, <\/em>Dallas Willard chronicles earnest Christians who became famous for \u201ceating no cooked food for seven years, exposing the naked body to poisonous flies while sleeping in a marsh for six months, not lying down to sleep for forty or fifty years\u2026 proudly keeping a record of the years since one had seen a woman, carrying heavy weights wherever one went, or living in iron bracelets and chains, explicitly vying with one another for the championship in austerities.\u201d
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In the 4th<\/sup> century A.D. in what is now Syria, a young man named Simon the Stylite scaled a 50-foot column.\u00a0 The top of the column was three feet across.\u00a0 Simon built a rail so he wouldn\u2019t roll off during his sleep.\u00a0 Friends supplied him with food that he hoisted to the top of the column by means of a rope.\u00a0 And there he stayed, without interruption \u2013 through rain, sun, wind, and snow \u2013 for 37 years.\u00a0 All in an attempt to remind himself to think of nothing but God.
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What have we learned from these \u201cspiritual athletes\u201d?\u00a0 Self-punishing physical rigors never deliver what they advertise.\u00a0
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What do people crave more than anything in the world?\u00a0 Love, joy, and peace<\/em>.\u00a0 Such miracles, however, don\u2019t become ours if and when we figure out how to kick our bodies into gear.
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Love, joy, and peace, in fact, are the first three of the nine \u201cfruits of the Spirit\u201d that Paul identifies in Galatians 5:22-23.\u00a0 These qualities grow within the hearts of those who steadily pursue a kinder, gentler pattern of spiritual surrender.\u00a0
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We can clench our fists and shout No<\/em> to the habits that afflict us.\u00a0 Or we can open our hands and whisper Yes<\/em> to the Holy Spirit who humbly awaits permission to fill us.\u00a0
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No matter what we choose to wear on our wrists, the real action happens every time we choose to give him our hearts.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Do you occasionally sleep past your designated wake-up time?\u00a0Maybe 255 volts will help your feet find the floor.\u00a0That\u2019s the thinking behind Pavlok, the fitness band that (according to its website) helps you \u201cwear your willpower\u201d and \u201cform good habits.\u201d\u00a0 Or, as others have suggested, Pavlok is like a Fitbit that hates you.\u00a0\u00a0For around $175 you can shock yourself into a… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1713,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[105],"class_list":["post-1712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-spiritual-disciplines"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1712"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1714,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1712\/revisions\/1714"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}