My fitness plan isn’t about extending life, but extending self utility.
We agree under our covenant to an otherworldly orientation. This life isn’t precious, but it’s subject to divine revelation for the sake of our Creator’s glory. Once His glory is finished with us, the body is discarded as we take a rest in preparation for eternal life after Christ returns to restore all things in Creation.
With rare exceptions, I still do my wake-up workouts six days per week. During winter we have a few nasty days here in Oklahoma when riding is imprudent, and I try to take a walk. Both riding and walking are still pretty much a matter of occupying the mind and body with some arduous task so the heart can more easily dominate and speak through my subconscious.
Today I spotted something along my path. I usually walk across a large cast iron grate in the parking lot of the mostly defunct shopping mall. It’s at the bottom of faint slope in all directions, and captured by this gravity well was a ball. It was bright green, about the size of a baseball. I picked it and it was rather heavy, and covered with scuff marks and dirt. Out of curiosity I gave it a bounce and it turned out to be one of those super-bounce balls that returns very nearly to the same level from which it was dropped.
So I carried this thing and began to bounce it. Clumsily at first, I started getting better at it as I walked along bouncing it between hands and off the brick wall of the empty building. It was mostly reflexive. Even on rough surfaces it tended to bounce predictably. I realized that it was improving my eye-hand coordination, so I kept at it, all the way home. This will be a new part of my routine when I take those fitness walks.
But the effort to maintain fitness extends farther in ways you may not expect.
My wife needed a Win10 machine with MS Office because of her job. We still had some money left from a recent windfall, so we got her a decent Lenovo laptop, taking advantage of the Black Friday sales. It’s an early Merry Christmas for her. She gave me back the laptop I bought a few years back, but then later gave to her — a 15″ Inspiron. It came with Win8 and nobody could tolerate that, so I changed it. After two years of running Win7 for her, I switched it over to Xubuntu. It works beautifully for me and has become my primary computer.
What happened to the expensive XPS I bought a few months ago? At a mere 13″ it’s too small for extended use. I still use it for tech support house-calls, though. And I still use that old desktop to process photos on the giant monitor someone gave me, but for reading for extended periods, and especially for writing, the Inspiron is by far the best machine.
There’s something about having my hands just above my lap that makes it less cumbersome to keep may fingers where they belong on the keys for extended periods. In other words, it’s mechanically advantageous, and the larger screen is much easier to read. In fact, the lower resolution (it’s at the cheaper end of the scale) is actually a good thing for my old eyes. I can keep the screen at arm’s length and not worry about glare; my eyes don’t get so tired. It’s an answer to prayer.
You see, the ultimate purpose of my walks and rides is prayer time. It’s a lot easier to pray out loud that way and hold a good conversation with God. I stop and talk to a few trees that call out to me along the way on my walking routes. I stop at prayer chapels on my rides; I talk to the wind and the rocks. I ask God to solve some of these minor issues, but even more importantly, I pray for Him to keep my head on straight, obedient to my heart.
All things I am and hold are tools for His glory.
