Strength Archives - Spartan Christianity

Being together with other people is great. It is a great tool. It can be encouraging and refresh us from the fatigue of the world. But it is not always enough. Sometimes it is important to be alone.

In religion, the idea of togetherness is promoted so often that it actually becomes a detriment to individual growth. Too much connectivity drains people. It makes us tired of them to the point that we can actually start to dislike them.

I think this is partially due to social media, as I have mentioned before. When we are far too connected, we cannot appreciate the time we are together. And the more time we are artificially together through social media, the greater the possibility that we say something that angers someone else, or vice versa. Ask any married couple – being together 24/7 is not always an advantage.

There are many times when we need to take time to be on our own.

This is critical for us to recover our mental and emotional states. Being with other people can be exhausting, and it is useful and necessary to take a break from them if possible.

I’m certainly not suggesting a break from church. That is never a good idea. But I am suggesting that you minimize the time you spend with people periodically. This would be a great advantage for you if you were able to do so.

When reading the New Testament, you quickly see that even Christ took time away from people to rejuvenate Himself.

Perhaps we do not have the same need to escape that He did, since He spent the vast majority of His waking hours with other people, teaching and helping them.

But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.
Luke 5:16

After he had dismissed them, he went up on a mountainside by himself to pray. Later that night, he was there alone,
Matthew 14:23

One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God.
Luke 6:12

But even so, we still have the same need to get away from people, take a break from work, and refresh our minds and emotional states. We need to be comfortable with this because it is a critical tool for us. For some reason, religion has the idea that if we are apart for more than a millisecond, our faith will crumble. Not only is this untrue, but it is insulting. It suggests that we do not have enough faith or individual strength to stand on our own legs. This cannot and must not be the case. We must be willing to develop strength alone, split from the pack and be our own man.

There is no need to spend endless hours with others, especially when they are likely to be very poor influences, poor role models, and mediocre in life in general.

Many people have used their religion to justify a mediocre existence. They also try to justify a lackluster effort in their careers and personal development, all the while calling themselves “spiritual”.

If we spend time around too many mediocre people, we will become mediocre ourselves. And unfortunately, many people in the church have labeled their mediocrity “spiritualism”. I cannot say this enough if someone is living a mediocre life and justifying it by calling themselves “religious” he/she is a person you want to avoid at all costs.

We need to be comfortable being alone.

We need to learn to savor it and use it to strengthen us. You cannot always rely on others to be the strength for us. At some point, we have to learn how to stand on our own feet. Your peers may not want you to learn how to stand on your own feet because then they will have to do the same. And standing with their own faith is something that takes work, tenacity, and willingness to fail. How many Christians have that? How many Christians are successful? Not enough to justify modeling their behavior in your own life.

If you model the actions of a failure, you will become a failure. If you model the actions of a masculine success, that s what you will become. You need to take advantage of good influences and good role models while avoiding the incredibly detrimental effects of the negative influences. This involves going it alone for a while. You have to be willing to do this.

Take time for yourself. A few days in the mountains detached from everything and everyone else. You need that time to refresh yourself so you can come back to your work with newfound excitement. Also so you can come back to the church with newfound energy to tolerate your less than perfect peers and develop the self-awareness to know that they are tolerating you as well.

Strength must be built alone. Whether it be physical, mental, or emotional strength does not matter. All that matters is that you do the vast majority of your training by yourself. I talk about this often because to become the strongest link while you are alone is so critical to becoming a powerful man.

Most people make the mistake of always training with and around others. When they do this, they may be able to build strength and perhaps even perform better with the help of their friends. But that is not true strength. It is not true strength because it is borrowed strength.

If I strength train with a partner and feed off his energy, I am not solely responsible for my strength gains. Because I needed to borrow his strength to perform because I did not have the strength to do it myself.

Now there is nothing wrong with getting that type of help on occasion. But If I only ever train with partners and with teammates, I will never develop my own strength. I will get into the habit of borrowing their strength instead of developing my own.

This will not be a problem in the present moment and maybe not for months or years, but eventually, it will be a problem.

Eventually, I will find myself in a situation with the team where I am the weakest link. I am the weakest link because even though I improved my strength in training, I was using borrowed strength of my teammates. And as a result, I never developed my own inner strength of mind.

The cure is to train alone. The only way to be the strongest link is to build your strength in isolation. When you have no choice but to rely completely and entirely on yourself in training, you develop far more than your physical strength. You develop the inner strength of the mind. You develop the valuable asset of self-reliance. This is vitally important because you cannot rely on anyone in this world, not even on your Christian brethren. The church preaches teamwork, but the Adversary never attacks you when you are at your strongest. He never attacks you when you are with your team. He waits until you are alone and have taken your armor off, and at that moment he strikes.

See Mark 4

Who are you in those moments? Who is the man you see in the mirror when you are all alone? Do you see a man who has built his own strength from the inside out or do you see a man who is weak but has created the illusion of strength by constantly training around strong people?

Make no mistake about it, it is useful to be around teammates, to train with others, and to rely on their strength especially during difficult times. But it is equally important to develop your own strength. Religion does not teach you this so I am telling you about it now, hoping that you will begin to learn the importance of solo training.

How do you apply this principle?

It is quite easy, but something no one does. Train alone. 80% of your training time should be done alone. This ensures that you build authentic strength of character. This means you are never the weakest link in any situation.

When you are doing your exercises, you need to do them alone. Does this make training more dangerous? Absolutely. What is life without a little danger? But it also guarantees that you will give a much greater effort than you would if you were training with someone else. Or even if you would give the same effort, at least you are relying on yourself instead of borrowing your partner’s strength. When there is no one there to help you, you have no choice but to give maximum effort or injure yourself.

I know this may be beginning to sound like an absurd, isolationist philosophy. But I assure you the only purpose of this is to motivate you to spend more time developing your own strength by yourself.

If all you ever do is train around teammates, their strengths can cover your weaknesses.

Because of this, you may never even know what your weaknesses are much less improve them. Getting away from the team puts you in a position where you are forced to take inventory of your physical, emotional, or mental strength, look for areas of weaknesses and begin to fix them.

I continue to use the physical strength analogy because it is easy to understand and relate to. But these principles apply just as much to mental and emotional strength. You cannot always rely on others for emotional or mental strength. Those people will not always be there for you. You need to be training for a worst-case scenario. And in every worst-case scenario, you are completely alone. So, train alone so you can be the strongest link. Do not mistake group strength for individual strength. Who cares what two people can do while working together? Tell me the story of the man who overcame the odds all by himself and did something spectacular.

Tell me the story of the man who becomes the strongest link by training in some isolated dojo for years.

You will not always have allies to form a shield wall with. You will need to be confident enough in your own abilities that you have no fear should you have to walk alone.

Fearlessness in walking alone is developed by first training alone. Then by improving alone. And finally, by mastering yourself alone. You have to strengthen yourself before you can help others. All help, whether physical, emotional, financial or otherwise can only come from a position of strength.

So, put yourself in that position, give yourself that strength by training alone. Then once you have become a great warrior or mind and body, then rejoin the ranks of the team. At that point, you can contribute far more to the team than you could because, because you have become the strongest link. Train alone so you can be more powerful when you train with others.

Tag: Strength

Be Willing to Be Alone