Lately my eight year old son has been asking about lifting weights. After a couple days of this I asked him why he wanted to lift weights, to which he responded that he wanted to be the strongest in his class. Unfortunately for my son, his father did not pass down to him the muscle-y gene. Not that I’m a slouch, but I was never the strongest, or the fastest. (If you are curious, Google AI told me that Mitchel Cooper of Canada is currently the strongest man in the world).
I was proud of my son for wanting to get stronger. If he is going to grow up in a world of men, strength is a way to earn respect. The admiration of physical strength is not a remnant of a less civilized era when dominance was primarily established by force. To this day, men and future-men delight to push their bodies to extremes, particularly in competitive situations. Those of us who are past our prime will still proudly tell the stories of how our coaches worked us so hard in the heat of summer that we puked on the sidelines, or passed out, or broke something or someone. Good times.
My assumption is that the slot for “strongest man in the world” is a revolving door. No one can stay up on that pedestal forever. Age may take its toll or injury may interfere. Whatever man attains to such a position, it is inevitable that he will one day look on a new occupant. But, as one preacher used to say, it’s better to be a has-been than a never-was.
Were I to become the strongest version of myself that I could be, I still would not be the strongest man in the world. My potential in that area has a lower ceiling than some others. But I will never know what the ceiling is because there simply isn’t enough time to dedicate to becoming that version of myself, nor is there the willingness to sacrifice the things (ie baked goods, comfort, or more nobly family time, etc…) that the god of fitness would demand. Becoming that version of me would require the abdication of other responsibilities that are more meaningful. This isn’t to say that a man couldn’t combine the pursuit of optimal strength with providing for his family and make a joyful career out of it, but I am not that man.
All of this got me to thinking about Samson, who really was the strongest man. Probably the strongest man who ever lived, although linear time prevents us from establishing this in the scientific method. But his is a tragic tale. I considered disparaging him, but then remembered that he was a mighty man of old, used by God, and enshrined in Hebrew 11’s Hall of Faith. He was strong, and he died well, but no one who reads his biography would want to live his life. He evinces no longing to trade places.
When I think about Samson, I think about a man who knew his strength, but not his weakness. He never appeared to doubt his ability to carry off the gates of the city in which he was trapped, but he couldn’t sense the danger in Delilah. He was like an overconfident toddler who had climbed on top of a piece of a furniture and everyone around could see the impending fall. Everyone except him.
So strength is a funny thing. It can blind us to weakness. Physical strength blinded Samson to his moral weakness. I wonder if riches have every blinded a man to his lack of virtue? Or power blinded a man to his cruelty? Or fame blinded a man to his pride?
I want my son to have his own stories of running until he puked or being the only one willing to wrestle the heavyweight at practice, so I will continue to encourage him to become “strong”. But I want to broaden his concept of strength to more than just his capacity to lift heavy things or run a certain distance at a certain speed. He needs to understand the limits of physical strength in protecting him from moral weakness. He needs to learn not to dance on the precipice of temptation. This, too, is strength.
Nathan Writes 