At the end of October I kept seeing advertisements on Facebook to take on the 2,000 push-up challenge as a way of supporting the mental health struggles of our troops and veterans. I decided to take on the challenge… not for the troops (even though I have immense respect and admiration for any individual that has served in our armed forces)… but for myself and my own mental health.
In many ways, I have been struggling with my own mental health struggles in the past two years. Times where I’ve been up and times where I’ve been down. Times when I thought things were beginning to work out just to feel like I was free falling again. In that time, my mental health took a huge hit along with my physical and spiritual health as well.
I can’t say I’ve always been in the best space mentally, and the last two years really tested that even further. For seven years I served as a pastor and during that time our family was going through some deep difficulty of working through some hard trauma from the past. And then, in the middle of that long seven year journey of struggle, the hardest hit I would personally take came right at my heart.
As I’ve walked the ups and downs (mostly downs really) of the last two years I decided to jump into the 2,000 push-up challenge. Mostly to give myself a little goal to see if I could stick with something. When I’m down, my go-to comfort is calorie consumption, so after a long journey of battling depression or border-line depression, the number on my scale continued to climb as my mental health felt like it was in a free fall. My wife thought I was trying to kill myself slowly. She wasn’t totally wrong. So, I gave myself a goal of 2,000 pushups in the month of November.
I found a guide broken out over the month from darebee.com. The plan alternated days of increasing push-ups and times for plank holds. The first day was 40 push-ups. Not terrible, and it was still a struggle. The third day was 50 push-ups. I started with 30, thinking I could do two sets – one of 30 and another of 20, but that was not the case. I did 30, then died out at 12 in the next set. Alright, only 8 more, so I tried a third set to do those 8, then died out after 4. Feeling embarrassed, I thought, surely I can get these last 4… but I only got 3, so I had to finish with 1 in my last set. To do 50 pushups it ended up looking like 30 / 12 / 4 / 3 / 1. That day was the hardest, and I kept going. I wasn’t going to give up on this like I felt like giving up on everything else.
By the end of the month I had to do 250 push-ups in one day. Seeing that at the beginning of the month I thought there was no way… especially with the reminder of how difficult it was to get 50 on day three. As the month continued I started to feel a little stronger, a little better. I was able to break the days into manageable sets, first starting with sets of 20, then pushing to 25 at a time, where I eventually pushed that to 30 or 40 push-ups in each set. That first day it took me three sets to do 40 push-ups. By the last day I was doing sets of 40 working towards the 250 push-ups for the day. I made it to 2,000 push-ups in the month of November.
I made it to something else as well. I started finding a little more hope in my life and in my circumstances. I stopped feeling so down on myself and thought there could be light at the end of the tunnel. That light still sometimes feels like it could be the light of an oncoming train, I guess I won’t fully know until I hit the end of the tunnel I’m still living in, but the reality is that I’m still in the tunnel. I didn’t stop. I didn’t give up like I was tempted to do.
I wouldn’t say I’m “better” yet. I don’t know if I’ll ever walk without a spiritual limp again. I recently shared with my wife that I feel a little bit like I had a “spiritual stroke.” The people I know who have had a stroke and survived are never quite the same again. There is always some extra difficulty they have with walking, talking, or doing the basic things. That is how I feel with my faith right now. I’m still here, and things are definitely not the same as they were.
Even as I’m still working on my own recovery, I don’t think I’ll ever hold the title of “pastor” again. Partially by choice and partially due to the unforgiveness I’m still holding on to and the pain I carry that makes being in a church service difficult. So, I’m trying to look at the little things, breaking the bigger goal into smaller “sets” to keep going. A recent “smaller set” for myself was that I was able to be in a church service the entire time without the desire to leave and sit in the lobby. I was even able to sing some of the songs along with everyone else.
What I have to remember is just like that day I was trying to hit 50 push-ups – even if it doesn’t look like the way I had planned in my head, I have to keep going to hit the goal. I can’t stop just because it was hard or things didn’t turn out the way I had hoped. My family still needs me to be here and while I’m here to be healthy physically, spiritually, and emotionally. So, here I am, doing a day of push-ups at a time in the other areas of my life as well. Working on the small things and not giving up. Knowing that I’m not who I once was or who I want to be again yet, and knowing that as long as I’m here, I need to keep walking in the journey doing one hard thing after the next.
I remember someone sharing with me once that the things worth doing are usually the hardest things to do. My road out of depression means continuing to choose the next hard thing on my journey and trust that the end will be worth it.
Steve Bensema 
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