Feet

One of my favorite anecdotes from Born to Run reads something like this:  “Why are my feet weak?” “Because smooth roads aren’t natural, our feet are made to run on rough terrain.” What I love most about this little explanation is its simple statement of truth running contrary to most of our beliefs. One of the real-life characters encountered in Born to Run is Barefoot Ted. His name explains what he does; he runs barefoot. At ultra-marathon distances. Over rocky terrain. Even most of the ultra-running community thinks he’s a freak. He constantly gets told he’s going to get hurt and to put some shoes on, but he’s gotten used to the nay-sayers and consistently proves them wrong with each and every race. It’s his persistence, and the proof of his running ability that we are capable of running without shoes, that is to say, running without all the additional cushy support found in modern running shoe technology. It sounds absurd, but I know it’s true, even though I don’t go so far as to run barefoot. I wear those ugly, frog-footed five-finger toes instead, and I love them. The question everyone wants to know? Why!?

The answer is simple. It’s healthier. I’ve been going to a chiropractor since I was in elementary school. One of the first things I was told was that I had a flat left foot and needed to wear orthotics the rest of my life. An answer I challenged when I got out of college because I couldn’t afford new shoes and new orthotics. I had to make a choice. Continuing down the path chiropractors told me about my feet, or try and get to the source of the problem and fix it. I chose to get to the source. As I did I began to discover a few things about feet and shoes.

Feet have a quarter of the body’s bones. They also have more bones, tendons, muscles and ligaments than our hands. This subtle structural meaning? Feet are made to move. But shoes often aren’t. The goal of most running shoes is to limit motion. That’s why it’s called motion control. When the foot cannot move, its muscles atrophy. Atrophied feet are more prone to injury. Weakened feet strain more easily, but most foot injuries are not quick, they build over time. This weakening and perception of strain leads us to believe we should surround our feet with more cushioning, restricting further motion and causing strain on the knee. The more cushioning on the foot, the more the knee has to stabilize; lots of foot cushioning leads to knee problems. To compensate for knee problems, we adjust our stride and foot striking out of proper alignment. This causes hip and lower back pain. What starts at the foot effects the rest of the body, causing a host of symptoms that stem from a single problem: weak feet. How can we strengthen our feet? Let’s return to our little narrative about natural surfaces.

Since feet are so flexible, they are made to run on uneven terrain. Our modern world is full of concrete, asphalt, tiles, wooden flooring and carpeting: we’ve done everything we can to make the world smooth. After all no one wants to get sued due to the trip hazards of natural terrain. The best place to start strengthening feet is to go off-road. Do some trail running. You don’t have to climb the nearest mountain, just get away from flat. Why? Because running long distances on purely flat surfaces can cause repetitive stress injuries. The body needs variation to stay healthy. Moving over uneven terrain allows the foot to move and for muscles to fire in different patterns. Different does a body good.

If you can’t find a trail near you, try going barefoot on flat surfaces. Going barefoot removes the fluff around the foot and brings it into directly into the contact with the world, causing it to move, flex and engage like it struggles to do in a shoe. As you do this, keep this in mind: your foot has forgotten what it’s like to run barefoot. Go slow, take your time, build your strength. This strengths muscles that have weakened in the ankle, allows the knees to stabilize properly and reduces the strain on the hips and lower back.

By going nearly barefoot on smooth surfaces I overcame my injuries and have been orthotic free for the past four years. It has literally changed how I walk. I am more mindful about the muscles in my feet and I can engage them, no matter what is on my feet or what I am doing. I can stand painlessly for hours. I can walk without knee or back pain. I can lift heavy weights and not feel like an old man the next day. Discovering the power in my feet has given me the power to do life. Which is why I believe we all need to take care of our physical feet, as well as our spiritual feet.

Biblically speaking, one of the highest compliments and signs of a healthy spirit is described by walking. Not praying. Not preaching. Not even teaching. Walking. The walk is what’s most important. It triumphs over activities. Why? Because when the walk is right so is everything else. Walking rightly with God changes everything else. The walk speaks where words fail. The greatest problem with Christianity today is a walking problem. It’s not a church structure problem, a church industry problem, a church institution problem, a church education problem, a church program problem or even a church service problem. The problem is in our individual walks. Everything else is a symptom of what’s really going wrong.

The main problem? Our feet are weak. We need to strengthen them. We need to learn how to walk out what we believe.

How do we do that? By going barefoot into the world. By walking in places where the road is not smooth. Not just physically, but also relationally.

Perhaps the problem of the twenty-first century is one of comfort, and the desire for comfort is killing us.

Some say the church is anemic and dying. Some believe logic, reason and the scientific method are triumphing over old religious systems. They believe it’s time we cast the old aside in the wake of a new world order. What is this new order based on? Perfection. Advancement. Evolution. Safety. The exact same things that are the claims of running shoe technology. Which means our running shoes should be making us healthier. But they aren’t. Something is wrong with this new world order thinking; it’s not applied in real world examples. It’s based on theory and an assumption. We are not made to run. We are not made to be mobile, to walk the uneven and rugged path. We must protect ourselves from it. Such science is flat out wrong. Our anatomy proves otherwise. We are made to run, without the artificial controlling support we’ve been told we need.

Perhaps the release of Born to Run has changed people's minds about shoes, after all its been almost a decade since it hit shelves. Nope. I was in a shoe store the other day and saw a lot of the same bad technology, and I saw a bigger section of orthotics to correct what the shoes couldn’t fix. Instead of trimming down shoes and getting to the heart of our foot problems solutions have multiplied. We have the same problem spiritually, we keep adding cushion, trying to make life easier instead of stripping down to basics and walking in direct sensitive contact with the world.

So what it is that we as individual Christians need to do with our own spiritual lives? Do we need to find the hardest part of town and start a social program? Maybe, but that’s not really the answer. The answer isn’t about picking up something new, it’s about changing how we do. The answer is not to new tools, but learning to use the ones we already have. We have the tools we need, we just need to start using then.

Where? Where we are. Ministry is not a profession. It’s a lifestyle. One of walking humbly before our God wherever we are. It’s the ability to admit when we’ve done wrong. To seek reconciliation instead of continual silence. I am convinced that we know where and to whom God has called us, we just don’t want to go and don’t want to humble ourselves. Sometimes it’s easier going to Africa than to the person sitting next to you, or talking to the people we work and live life with:family members can be especially difficult. Confession and Forgiveness may be hard, but they are the tools to break the darkest of nights. Admitting wrong is the best way to start making things right. To start getting our feet off the smooth path of prideful comfort and on to the uneven road of healthy feet.

Walking as Jesus walked takes humility, we often make mistakes along the way. Pride acts as a cushion, as a justification for how we screwed up. Laying down our pride is the beginning of a new day and the strengthening of our weak feet. It’s the only way to start changing our world.

Fitness Tips

Recently I read Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall. It covers some of the same ideas as Eat and Run, by Scott Jurek, but has a different story. The story goes something like this, Chris can’t run without getting hurt. He wants to know why. His journey takes him into the Copper Canyons of Mexico where he meets a tribe of Indians who run ultra-marathons every other day or so. Despite their obscene mileage, their bodies don’t break down from running. In short, running doesn’t hurt them, but it does hurt him. The book is an accumulation of whys, including stories about ultra runners: their habits, their stamina, and their eating habits. It’s a fascinating read, but for those who won’t get around to it, here are a few fitness tips from the book.

1.       Short choppy steps are faster and healthier than long strides

2.       Running on the ball of the foot engaging your toes

3.       Plant based diets enhance recovery times

4.       Eat a salad for breakfast, it helps energize your day

5.       To burn fat, have a conversation while you run

6.       Aerobic exercise combats anxiety, depression and grouchiness

7.       Running with good form overcomes injuries

8.       Playing a bit of soccer is a good way to strengthen all leg muscles

What’s fascinating about these facts? You don’t have to understand them in order to benefit from them. The Tarahumara Indians, who Chris learned most of these facts from, don’t understand the science behind how they live, they simply live. Their entire culture builds healthy runners. It’s taken western scientists and coaches long hours of research to understand how and why what they do is beneficial, but for the Indians it’s just a way of life. Their secret to being great runners? Live. Our secret to great running? Research, long hours of training and then living. Interesting how we add more mental effort into the equation. I guess that’s part of the western way of life.

When I think about spiritual principles, we often try to understand them before we practice them. In other words we spend time studying the Tarahumara instead of living with them. We seek to understand by principles of reason, logic and science when the evidence is right before our eyes. As Chris discovered, he had to completely change his style in order to enjoy running. It took him a lot of effort and a professional coach to help him achieve his goal. Except when he was running alongside one of the Indians western friends. When he did that he felt an instant change. He could study have someone coach him or he could run with the Indians. As running with the Indians wasn’t an option he had to use a coach. But is that the best way to learn and study? It certainly works, but there is something about training by practicing with others, minus the intensive coaching, that produces the same results at a faster pace. I could call it immersion, but I would rather call it love.

When we practice with someone who is fully devoted to their cause: when they live and breathe it every day, losing awareness of how they are doing it, that’s the beginning of radical transformation. Living and breathing for the cause makes change easier than trying to reason it out. Having someone who simply walks the right way makes an amazing difference. What reason and logic may take years to understand can be experienced by simply trying it out. Which is what we have tips for. To help guide us in the way we should practice, not to completely define our practice, but to help us along the way.

The same is true of Biblical commands. The point of the commands is to love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Which sounds really simple, but in actuality is really hard. Especially when we’re caught in a difficult circumstance and are not sure what to do. This is why God gave the Israelites more commands, to help guide them along the way. To help them understand the nature of his love.

At this point, you might expect me to recite the 10 commandments, but I’m not going to do that. The above fitness lifestyle tips are all positives. I could explain why God used negatives in the commands, but it’s not central to my goal for today. My goal for today is to describe, using tips, what it means to live out God’s love.

1.       Serve the one true God

2.       Let creation teach you about God, but remember He is more than creation.

3.       Honor God’s name and use it appropriately

4.       Rest on Sunday and encourage others to do so

5.       Speak well of your parents and look after them

6.       Resolve conflicts by spreading life

7.       Be completely devoted to your spouse

8.       Give so others are taken care of

9.       Tell the truth

10.   Be content with the things you have and give thanks for them

This isn’t a definitive list of how to live as a Christian, but it’s a good place to start. It’s also a good place to return and remind ourselves of what God asks of our lives. It’s also a paraphrase, and if you’d like to read the 10 commandments you can find them in Exodus chapter 20, verses 3 through 17. Spiritual fitness is a lot like physical fitness. It takes time and effort, but is always easier to achieve in a group of supportive and invested people. Even though that’s not one of the tips J

Strength of Heart

After coming back from wedding and honeymoon festivities I returned to my regular exercise routine. My first day back was all about strength. I lifted heavy, breathed hard and walked away with the right amount of muscle burn. My second day was all about recovery. Stretching, doing a little bit of light cardio and spending extra time my favorite piece of equipment: the foam roller. During that second day workout, I looked down at the bicycle I was riding and noticed something odd. Heart Monitors. I wasn’t riding the bike to improve my heart, I was riding to flush the lactic acid out of my system and improve my endurance. Cardio equipment comes with heart monitors to provide a scientific measure of how hard a person exercises. But most of us don’t use the heart monitor to tell us how our hearts are doing. We use it to measure something else. Like whether or not we’re pushing our level of fitness. Which is odd, because life without a healthy heart is hard and miserable. The heart is the most important muscle in the body. If it fails everything else stops. Literally. A few days ago I read an account of man who had a heart attack. It reduced him to a state of helplessness. Minutes before he was going about his day doing what he loved most. Then all of a sudden his heart gave out. He collapsed, and could only rely on others for help. His honest account was a humble reminder that life changes in an instant, and the most important things in life are often overlooked. Like our hearts. Looking at the heart monitor I asked myself one simple, yet philosophical question, “When do I train my heart?”

Cardiorespiratory training, AKA cardio is what most of us in the fitness industry would call heart training. If there was such a thing, because very few people intentionally train their hearts. The problem with cardio as heart training? When we talk about cardio, we spend most of our time talking about breathing or muscle fatigue. We don’t talk about cardio in terms of what it’s doing to our hearts or how it makes our heart feel. Which is a rather odd, because our word cardio comes from the Greek word cardia, meaning heart. In today’s fitness world, we don’t talk about the conditions of our hearts. It gets overlooked because we focus on the more visible details. We talk a lot about strength, flexibility, tone, and how well conditioned we are, but the heart gets left out of the conversation. I’ve never heard a fitness instructor say, “Engage your heart” or “Let’s get those ventricles pumping” Even writing that cue makes me shiver. It’s awkward. No one says that. Despite my lack of heart training tools and vocabulary, I can’t help thinking of the benefits of a big heart. A big heart means big activity: more oxygenated blood delivered at a more efficient pace. More oxygen means greater endurance and the more efficiently blood circulates through the body the easier it is to run farther, longer, and faster. Simply put strong hearts are capable of amazing physical feats. Not just in humans, but horses too. One of the winningest horses in Australia racing history had a massive heart. It’s so famous I can’t remember its name, but that horse had a massive heart, powering it on to victory and again and again. Why was that horse so much faster than its competition? The size and strength of its heart. The horse’s heart is on display in the nation museum in Canberra. It’s at least 4 inches/10 cm wider than a normal heart! Big strong hearts are capable of big strong things.

When it comes to measuring the strength of our human hearts, I think science comes up a little bit short. Measuring the heart isn’t just a matter of size, there’s more to hearts than that. True, we can measure systolic and diastolic pressure, we can measure beats per minute, we can measure resting heart rates, but these are superficial ways of measuring the heart. These measurements may define a healthy heart, but a healthy heart is more than its measurements. It’s not about how slowly your heart beats while resting, or how fast it recovers from exercise: a heart’s condition says something about the person, who they are, not just their physical condition.

If we look at historical old world definitions of the heart, we find the heart is more than a muscle. It’s a description of a person’s entirety. It’s the total of someone’s attitudes, beliefs, expectations, hopes and dreams. A person with a big heart is generous and giving, full of empathy for others. A person with a lot of heart never gives up, even against difficult odds. A person with a small heart doesn’t think about others, and a person with a weak heart means well but gives in even though at the first signs of difficulty. Our old world friends thought a strong heart was a sign of character: someone capable of noble deeds and selfless acts. It wasn’t just about having your heart in the right place, or having a physically strong heart, but showing what was inside your heart by outward action. You knew someone’s heart by how they acted, not just who they said they were.

When I think about Jesus’ heart, I could measure it by the works that he did: healing, teaching, standing up for others rights. But that’s the full measure of Jesus. Jesus was more than the total of his actions. I think of John’s description of Jesus heart, moments after Jesus died on the cross. It tells us how Jesus died. “When [the soldiers] came to Jesus and found that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. Instead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water.” Jesus didn’t die because he couldn’t breathe. He didn’t die from blood loss. He didn’t die of thirst. He died because his heart failed. The separation of blood and water in his body is evidence of this. Jesus died of a broken heart. Or a myocardial infarction for those who’d like to use the fitness term J Very unusual for a person who walked his whole life, had a diet consisting mainly of bread and fish, and who was in his early thirties. Isn’t it odd that Jesus died of a broken heart?

Jesus heart broke, not his spirit. His body, though mangled, did not give out. Instead his heart, the old world measure for the entirety of his earthly self, broke. What caused this? What could break the heart of Jesus? What could break a man who could endure such physical punishment? Looking at Luke’s account I think I have an answer. It comes straight from Jesus mouth as he hung on the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.” Our ignorance and lack of understanding broke his heart. Our refusal to know God and live in His love broke Jesus heart. That was his choice. He chose to love us, even though we freely deny his love. Jesus, who came to heal the broken, not just the physically deformed, but also the relationally maimed and spiritually disenchanted came to set us free from the habits and behaviors that drag us down. He came to set us free from the heaviness of our hearts, to cast off the unneeded weight, allowing us to live freely and rightly surrounded by his love. Instead of accepting his free offering of wholeness, we ran away. We couldn’t escape him, but we, like wounded animals, turned on him and killed him. Jesus knew this was the price. He did it anyway. He willingly gave up his life and let his heart break. For us. For us to know God, for us to have the opportunity to have our hearts strengthened, opened and made whole. Jesus’ heart wasn’t weak. It wasn’t small. It was big and full of character. It was big enough to give us all a second chance, and strong enough to overcome the pain of the cross. He endured where we ran away. Truly he had a heart like no other.

But did we really do this to Jesus? We who live in this day and age, even though Jesus died thousands of years ago? What do we have to do with his death? Jesus heart didn’t break for a small community of Jews living in a small region of the world at a point and place in time, his heart broke for all people, in all places, across all time. How could a human heart do this? Simple. Jesus had more than a human heart. He had the heart of God. Not a heart after God, but the heart of God. Jesus was God himself: God in human form. Even though Jesus died of heart failure, his heart was stronger than death. That was why his heart broke in the first place. Jesus put all of himself, his entire being into facing down death and conquering it. He did the death workout so we don’t have to. We will still die a physical death, but we have the opportunity of life after death. Of living with God in world where there are no more tears, where every eye has been dried and every wrong has been made right. That is what Jesus died for, for us to have an opportunity at eternal life, not just physical life.

But that’s not all, there’s more.

Jesus didn’t just die for a distant future living in perfect harmony, Jesus died for the here and the now. Jesus lived to heal and to make things right. He wasn’t just a wise spiritual sage. He actually healed people. He opened eyes, put strength into weak legs, raised people from the dead and freed people from the demons that had haunted them for their whole lives. Entering into Jesus love isn’t just about eternal security, it’s about having a touchable, visual and measurable effect upon life around us. Accepting the heart of Jesus isn’t just a personal thing, it’s communal. Accepting Jesus into your life not only changes and heals the brokenness of your life, but it also gives us grace to take part in the healing of those around us. He gives us the strength to bring life into places where there has been death: to right what has been made wrong. He gives us the strength because his heart is strong. He give us what he has, and his heart will never run dry.

Jesus heart is big, too big for us to keep hidden in the dark corners of our personal lives. His heart must shine through us and pour out of us or else there is no place for his heart in our lives. The mark of a strong heart is reliance on Jesus, to face impossible odds and come out victorious. Jesus faced his own death and was able to overcome his fears and live out what God had for him to do. He set us free by his life, and united us with God by his death. He did what no one else could do, and by his heart we are able to do what few others can. Live life with a strong and noble heart.