• Time you awoke
today ____
• Your heart rate
upon awaking ____
• Your blood pressure
upon awaking ____
• Your cholesterol
number ____
• The amount of time
you slept each night last week, on average ____
• The number of
minutes you exercised in the last 24 hours ____
• Your maximum heart
rate during the exercise ____
• The number of
calories you consumed yesterday ____
• How many
milligrams of caffeine you consumed yesterday ____
• How many
milligrams of various vitamins and minerals you took yesterday ____
• Your pain level
yesterday, on a scale of 1-10 ___
• Your mood today,
on a scale of 1-5 ____
These days, there is a good chance
that some of us can provide personal data on several of these questions,
including the one for info from a year ago. That is partly because personal
technology has now made collecting such numbers easy. Computers, iPhones,
pedometers, heart-rate monitors, blood-sugar meters, cyclometers and the like
not only make it simple to read our personal numbers but also to maintain a
record of them.
What seems to animate the “personal
metrics movement” is the ability to analyze such personal data in hope of
harvesting better personal results. Professional athletes have long tracked
such things as heart rate, metabolism, diet and other factors to improve their
performance. Now, ordinary people, you and I, can use tracking such information
to achieve weight loss, improvements in physical fitness, better performance in
our sports activities and so on.
I did not realize it at the time,
but Suzanne and I participated in all this. I have gone through times of
strictly controlling the amount of calories I consume during the week. I have
also started taking my heart rate after exercise. Suzanne has something called “fitbit”
that keeps track of her activity during the day and even how well she is
sleeping at night.
As Gary Wolf explained in Wired
magazine in 2009, in an article he entitled, “Know Yourself,”
“If you want new insights into yourself, you harness the power of
countless observations of small incidents of change — incidents that used to
vanish without a trace. And if you want to test an idea about human nature in
general, you aggregate those sets of individual observations into a population
study.”
I can imagine all of this applied to
faith as well. Just as we can now apply a number to pain, or figure out our
mood, I suppose someone has figured out a number to apply to faith. How is your
faith right now? Oh, I am five today, how about you? From what I know of John
Wesley and his “methodical” approach to spiritual formation, he would have
liked that approach.
Generally, as this article suggests,
I think it better to know yourself than not know yourself. “Know thyself,” is a
well-known phrase, inscribed in gold letters over the portico of the temple of
Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece. Plato refers to it several times, and
encouraged those who would listen to learn what it meant.
Just as famously, Shakespeare, in Hamlet,
has the phrase, “to thine own self be true.”
We human beings are very concerned
with the “self.”
The Bible has this concern as well,
but with a twist.
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