Men, Take Care of Yourselves

My wife took a picture of me walking out the door for my first day of Hebrew. In the photo, I am smiling, healthy, excited, and (relatively) fit. My wife enjoys pulling out another photo – a picture of me after I finished Hebrew intensive later that summer. In the photo I look tired, slightly drained of life, and smiling weakly—seemingly just glad to be alive. In the photo I have the first signs of gray hair and am almost ten pounds heavier than when I began Hebrew.

I feel like these two photos encapsulate in a near prophetic way my own approach to the work of ministry and the way I’ve taken care of myself in the process. Because the work is more important than me, I neglected myself. Because the work is bigger than this one man, I spent myself. Because I’m just a small instrument whom God can take and use as he will, I made the decision to preach the gospel, die, and be forgotten (Count Zinzendorf). And I think this was the attitude of most of my seminary classmates. Even more, I think it is the attitude of many of those who occupy pastoral ministry.

Because of this deeper spiritual attitude, I entered seminary weighing 225 lbs, and 8 years later (and 4 years into the pastorate) I had ballooned up to 278 lbs. I would largely attribute this to the sedentary work of reading, writing, and preaching. It also isn’t helped by the sort of food one eats with a family of six and a frugal mindset. If I could put it simply, I did not take care of myself, and I thought that was okay, or that I had no other choice.

As I look back on the 8 years in which I put on this weight, I was working very hard. Usually I was writing and preaching two sermons a week, serving on my presbytery’s review of session records, writing and teaching Sunday School, counseling, visiting the sick, writing articles, reading books, spending time with our church interns, and just generally trying to be a good pastor – all the while being a husband and father. I felt like I had too many distractions and too much important work to do.

A couple of things changed this for me. One thing was that I began to feel increasing anxiety in my own heart. When I shared with some friends about this, one of them said, “If you’re anxious, you need to go run and exercise.” All my life, I always associated exercise with luxury. In the movies it is the wealthy and spoiled person who goes to the gym and has the time to just run in place like an insane person. Or it was the dumb lunkheads who lifted weights. I was neither wealthy nor a lunkhead, and so I had never taken this “luxury” seriously. Eventually I went to a biblical counselor who encouraged me to see if exercise helped my anxiety. I slowly discovered that it did.

Eventually I got over my own hangups about exercise and learned to enjoy taking care of myself, but that has been a recent development. In June of 2024 I was at my record weight of almost 280 and I made the decision that I would diet and exercise. I began tracking what I ate, and cut my calorie intake dramatically, striving for a healthy combination of protein, fats, and carbs appropriate for my weight. I also got a Withings step-tracking watch (one that I don’t have to charge twice a day) and began walking 10,000 steps per day, rain or shine. I also purchased weight equipment for my garage, and began lifting 5 days a week. I now have a little gym which I use almost daily and I never skip my walks unless I’m sick. I also have not stopped tracking my meal intake. It has been 9 months since I began, and I have now put on a lot of muscle, and at the same time my weight has dropped from 278 to 248, which means I have lost a lot more than 30 lbs. of fat. It feels great to take care of myself, and I would never have thought I would say that.

Why do I give the extensive autobiography here? Because I know firsthand that as Pastors we don’t just give spiritual and ministry-oriented excuses for not taking care of ourselves, we also believe those excuses. Time is something we often feel we don’t have the luxury of. Energy can always be devoted to something that seems more important than walking in circles or lifting heavy things. And yet there is always a cost to neglecting to take care of ourselves.

I have heard it said that all pleasure comes at a cost: legitimate pleasure, you pay before. Illegitimate, you pay after. The man who decides not to watch what he eats, and who decides not to exercise may think that he is helping his church and his family because he is doing something more important than a Sisyphean routine to take up time and make him tired. He is making a decision that he still eventually has to pay for.

God’s people need a pastor who is taking care of himself. A pastor who is healthy and taking care of himself is less of a burden on others, is able to help others more, is hopefully less of a financial burden on his flock and family, lives as a better example for his family and church, and is generally in a better state of mind. He also improves his chances of not leaving his wife a widow unnecessarily early. These things are also true of Christian men in general as well.

Christians also understand that self-discipline is a virtue, and that a man who lacks self-control “is like a city broken into and left without walls” (Prov. 25:28). Self-control is one of the fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-23). Even more, Paul tells Titus that an elder in Christ’s church (among other things) must be “self-controlled.” I often wonder if the author of Hebrews had been to the gym when I read, “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful” (Heb. 12:11). Discipline does come in different varieties, sometimes imposed by others, but often ministers especially need to discipline themselves. Perhaps some of us as men do need the encouragement to become much more self-disciplined. Is it possible that in the name of productivity, busyness, and kingdom-work we are training ourselves to become cities without walls?

I am not saying that it is necessarily always a sin for a man not to diet and exercise. But it could be. I would encourage each of us to ask if we might be neglecting the virtue of self-discipline, especially if there are ways that we are neglecting to take care of ourselves.

As somebody who spent most of his life on the heavier side, I’m not judging those who have struggled to lose weight. For me, the weight gain was the presenting symptom of my own decadence, it was a way for me to work hard in one way, but become lazy and self-indulgent in another. I do think it’s time that we as men refuse to make spiritualized excuses for our poor lifestyles. I really wish that I’d had an older brother in the faith who would’ve slapped me across the face and told me this years ago.

Adam Parker is the pastor of Evergreen PCA in Beaverton, OR.