No such thing as a sedentary adventurer …

When Stan hired me to be his Personal Trainer, it was because he had to, not because he wanted to.

Stan was in his mid-fifties, part owner in a successful family business, and physically falling apart. He had been battling horrible effects of Crohn’s foot and had already been wearing the boot to stablize damage to his foot. He was obese, diabetic, and hadn’t exercised on purpose in many years. His physician told him he had better do what he needed to do to improve his fitness, or he would die young.

So he came to see me.

Stan got the message about his health, and so he got focused. With dedication to his exercise and nutrition program, it wasn’t long until we started seeing improvements.

Stan is like many people who devalue maintaining their fitness and allow themselves to be swept away by the busyness of life. Many of them adamantly insist something of great value would have to go in order for them to take the time to exercise … until their doctor tells them it’s do or die. Suddenly, they’re able to make the time without it causing calamity to other aspects of their lives.

We do the same with our faith. It sits dormant until enough troubles come along that we go running to God to bail us out. We allow the dust to build on our Bibles until we need some answers we haven’t come up with on our own. But neither our physical being nor our spiritual being are designed to go unexercised. To keep both healthy and strong, we’re required to exercise and feed them well routinely.

The ideal recommendation for attaining and maintaining fitness is 30 minutes of activity per day, every day. In other words, just maintaining a reasonable level of activity, along with good nutrition, often is sufficient to build and maintain physical fitness. Likewise, keeping our faith active by exercising it every day keeps our spiritual health robust and strong for those times when we really need strength.

Stan didn’t need to spend his life coming to the gym every day to have experienced a physically healthy life. He could have simply been active with things that he may have enjoyed … walking, running, biking, hiking, swimming, sports, gardening or some other activity that would have kept him moving. Instead, he went to work, but his management role was a fairly sedentary job. Then he went home, ate a large dinner, and then went to bed … the perfect recipe for weight gain and muscular atrophy.

In the same manner, we don’t have to go to church every day to exercise our faith. We can build it by daily Bible study, explore it in prayerful conversations with God, apply it in our relationships, and demonstrate it in our business decisions every day.

I once heard faith compared to a rope. You don’t take a rope, coil it up, and throw it in a corner. You take a rope and hang off the side of a mountain with it! In other words, you purposely look for ways to use your faith by choice every day. Like the adventurer who jumps out of a plane with a parachute, or off a bridge attached to a bungee cord, or scales a vertical cliff, the spiritual adventurer looks for adventures in faith.

How fit are you … physically and spiritually? What are you doing on a daily basis to build and maintain both physical and spiritual fitness? What adventures are available to you today that could exercise your body and your faith?

Scotty