Tom Wolfe has a perceptive passage in his latest book, I Am Charlotte Simmons<\/em>, where he talks about college weight-rooms packed with young men packing muscles on their sweaty bodies. I read that awhile ago and have thought some on the nature of weight-lifting. We\u2019re all so domesticized these days; most of us have no war to fight, no enemy to slay, and so we slay the mirror, we conquer the weight-bench, we pound the treadmill. We men still yell in the heat of exertion, but it is no longer accompanied by a sword-thrust. It signals, anticlimactically, a biceps curl. Woo-hoooo. Not exactly \u201cFREEEEDOOOOMMMMMM\u201d from dying lips.<\/p>\n And why all this sweaty fuss? Well, let\u2019s just cut to the chase: it\u2019s about appearance. Yes, even for Christians, it\u2019s often tied to one\u2019s image. Now, I would certainly not say that any attention to one\u2019s appearance is wrong; far from it. The Bible actually seems to support carrying oneself with dignity before men and God. Also, we need exercise. And it\u2019s good to be strong and fit\u2013you live longer if you are, chances are. All that said, we all know pride is wrong, and so we who are especially body-conscious need to check our motives and stuff like that. But what is most interesting in this brief discussion is this: working out is like make-up for guys. We don\u2019t put on mascara, but we do put on biceps, or big shoulders, or rounded calves. Is that weird to anyone else?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tom Wolfe has a perceptive passage in his latest book, I Am Charlotte Simmons, where he talks about college weight-rooms packed with young men packing muscles on their sweaty bodies. I read that awhile ago and have thought some on the nature of weight-lifting. We\u2019re all so domesticized these days; most of us have no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1217,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[13035],"class_list":["post-3914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n