It’s time for something radical.

We’ve collectively experienced quite a lot since the beginning of 2020, and revival is ripe and ready to do what it does.

I have a modest offering toward those ends, but I want to share it with you anyway.  As we approach a new year with renewal quivering for its moment to burst, I want to publish a project I’ve been working on for the last several years.

It may make more sense to publish it with a house.  It most certainly forfeits financial opportunity by making it all available here.  And it may be just plain silly to let it all hang out without professionals raking it for missteps (and I’m sure it has many).

The truth though, is the more I sat with this content, the more I was led to share it.

Over the coming weeks, I will make each chapter of content available to you through this site, starting with the foreword (today!).

No subscriptions, no commitments, no strings attached.  If you want to subscribe to the newsletter, please do.  If you want to buy The Refuge, yes!  If you want to share each chapter with your people, let the chorus shout its hallelujahs.The idea is to bring you life-giving content that will encourage you in the next step of your own sanctification – whatever that may look like.  

Let me tell you a little bit about what you’re getting into…

My background is in the health, wellness, and behavior change industry.  I have studied and worked in the field for a little over fifteen years and I have been molded by watching and assisting people along their holistic health journeys.

Dig is a book that approaches health, wellness, and behavior change from a whole new perspective.  It may be a timely resource in this season when we set New Year’s resolutions and take fresh looks at our habits and lifestyle choices.  Each year I set a character goal for myself, and this content has challenged me greatly in the way I approach even that.

I don’t know if it will be helpful for you, but I hope it will be a supporting light to you in your next season, whatever that season may be.  To borrow A.W. Tozer’s sentiment, my fire may not be large, but it is yet a fire, and perhaps one of you can light a flame from this one.

So to you, with love.

Nic Ford

Dig.  

Uncovering the Idols that Control Our Choices.

Foreword

In one of the first conversations I ever had about this project, long before there existed even one word on a page, a pastor I respect very much said this to me:

“Your idea, it’s a good one, but let me prepare you for something…

I can tell them to have patience and be kind to each other. 

I can tell them to love their neighbors. 

I can tell them not to cheat on their spouses. 

I can even tell them what to do with their money. 

But if I tell them not to eat those doughnuts, they’ll never come back.” 

It is nothing short of a phenomenon that we will accept teaching, guidance, and boundaries in so many areas of our lives, but if a spiritual leader tells us what we can and cannot eat, the seats threaten emptiness. The relationship we have with our bodies is unique, profoundly personal, and unmatched in vitality.  It is so much those things in fact, that we allow ourselves to be informed by a spiritual leader in every way but the one way that may be most intimately tied to our holistic selves. 

That feels just a little bit backwards, doesn’t it?

Can I put one thing out in the open right away?  I don’t have all this figured out.  Behavior change is hard.  Humans and human habits will always perplex me – including my own.

And with that truth, this one too.  There is one thing I know.  One thing that has become terribly clear through all of this.  Our natural, human bent toward idol worship has a lot more to do with our lifestyle choices than I ever thought possible.  I’m not talking about character challenges like patience, forbearance, integrity, humility, etc.  I’m talking about our lifestyle choices.  What we eat.  How often we move.  What we choose to do with our daily allotment of time.  I think idol worship is more intimately connected to those choices than we ever thought.

“For I do not understand my own actions.  For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”  Romans 7:15

It’s true in the battle against sin, and it’s true in the fight with our habits, behaviors, and lifestyle choices.  It’s true in our addictions, our dishonoring personality traits, our self-concerned natures.  And it’s most definitely true in the battle against our own self-wills.

I propose one simple question:

What would happen if instead of trying to conquer food, movement, and other lifestyle choices like our relationship with technology, we instead focus on the battle against our own sinful natures?

We hear it said all the time:  our bodies are a gift from God – His temple – and it’s our responsibility to honor that.

“Therefore I urge you brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.  This is your true and proper worship.”   Romans 12:1

If it’s our true and proper worship to present ourselves, our bodies, to God, I have to believe it’s our job to make sure what we’re presenting is at its best… or at least the best we can make it.

Consider this:  the facts about how to live healthfully haven’t changed.

For decades scientists and doctors have delivered one singular message for optimal health:  eat mindfully and move regularly.  Simple.  Though executing that very simple direction is not so simple at all.

We are absolutely, unequivocally enslaved to our habits.

What is perhaps most paradoxical about our current health crises is that resources and accessibility to healthful options have never been more present in this country.  Nearly all of what’s killing us is highly researched and widely associated to preventable conditions or simple changes in behavior.  That means we know exactly how to combat what’s killing us, we have the resources to change the things we need to change, and yet, we are choosing not to change anything at all and dying anyway.

Social media is great example.  In the book Anxiety and Disorders: The New Achievements, authors point to the devastating statistics of how the use of technology, namely social media, is affecting us, decimating mental health and sky rocketing suicide rates and yet, our country’s social media usage is higher than it has ever been.

Sugar is another visible challenge.  Our bodies are more addicted to sugar than ever in the history of the world.  The occurrences of type II diabetes are extraordinary and going widely unattended though in most cases it is preventable, reversible, and manageable.

If the answer to changing all of this was as simple as executing what we already know, this wouldn’t be the foreword of the book, it would be the afterword.

We’ve known the simple solution to our holistic health problems for a very long time now, but it still hasn’t helped.  Our health statistics continue to worsen.  We face a clinically depressed, suicidal, sugar-addicted, obese, Wall-e reality if we don’t start getting better.  And let it be stated that some conditions are not preventable, are highly genetic, and cannot be influenced by typical behavior change.  This speaks only for those choices we actively make that perpetually work against us.

The seed that planted this project was a 15-second snippet from the end of a Tim Keller sermon.  Dr. Keller said,

“If you want to understand the intellectual trends in your field, see the idols.  If you want to understand what’s going wrong in your industry, see the idols.”

In the strike of a match, I saw fifteen years of observations make a lot of sense.  There is something terribly wrong in the field of health, wellness, and behavior change, and it’s hidden in a place we’re not seeing because we’re not seeing the idols.

In that same sermon, Dr. Keller points out that Paul approaches all of life differently when he’s seeing the idols around him.  He listens to music differently, does his job differently – does life differently – because he’s seeing the idols.

That is the purpose for which this project exists.

Does clearly seeing our idols impact our daily lifestyle choices?  And if it does, can we finally start to move the needle on our holistic health by addressing them?

Doing this kind of work might change your ‘why’.  It might get really hard.  It might be the person in mirror, not the body in the mirror, that gets the makeover.

I propose that the battle against our lifestyle choices actually resides in the battle against our idols.

So, pick up a shovel.  It’s time to dig.