Posts Tagged: Søren Kierkegaard

“Spiritual Training Age”

On September 10, 2021 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

To ask a very personal question, what is your training age?

I am seventy years old and still playing slow-pitch softball. However, even though it is a good thing (maybe) to be still playing, that doesn’t mean I’m playing well.

So, I’ve decided to actually concentrate and learn to play well—or, at least, better. I am beginning with conditioning exercises.

I watched a brief video online just now at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAOs91KGpYQ (accessed 09-10-2021), and plan to do the exercises today, and for many more todays. I hope they help.

But whether the exercises help me to play softball better or not, I was intrigued with an expression that the young trainer used: “training age”. A person’s training age is not how long he or she has been playing a sport, but how long that person has been actually training for the sport. In softball, I am not even a toddler in terms of training age. This is not a particularly flattering way of being young.

This training age expression invites me to think about more than softball. What is my training age in addiction recovery? What about my marriage training age and my friendship training age?

And then there is my training age in Christian discipleship. The question to ask is not “How long have I been a Christian?” Rather, the question I need to ask (but often don’t) is “How long have I been training in following Jesus Christ?”

Søren Kierkegaard wrote a book entitled Training in Christianity. In it he said that Jesus called followers, not admirers. One crucial aspect of the difference between admiring and following is our training. Admirers don’t follow or train. They just spectate. Discipleship is not a spectator sport.

I heard of an interviewer who asked a job applicant a crucial question: “Do you really have twenty years of experience, of just a year’s experience repeated nineteen times?” Perhaps I should ask the same question about my Christian discipleship.

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