By Brad Bloom, Publisher
I want you to look further and see what’s beyond your immediate circumstances and your regular routine. Your perspective shapes places.
We’ve all been there. The church we visited, the restaurant we were told has the best _____, the gym with several rave reviews and yep, the vacation destination we so eagerly anticipated. Places that ultimately left us saying, “That sure wasn’t what I expected. Not even close.”
For many people physical fitness is a lot like that. The diet plan that over promises or under delivers, the fitness studio that’s so awesome, and the latest fad exercise program with cool new technology are all great — at least for a while.
We humans are kind of tough creatures to keep happy. Our market economy is actually built on that.
On the scale ranging from fat to fanatical where are you when it comes to your faith and physical fitness? Are you board, disappointed, frustrated and have totally thrown in the towel because you hate it? Or, are you too heavily invested, outright obsessed and even consumed? You likely don’t identify completely with either extreme, but at the same time you may not have totally figured out the place that God and a healthy active lifestyle should have in your life. It can be tough to put fitness (and faith) in its place.
How do you find the best church on earth, that eatery that delivers the ‘incredible’ every time, the health club that truly makes a continual difference and the get-away place that you can’t wait to get away to again? What’s the reason some people seem to frequently fail while others regularly flourish? How is it that many today feel trapped in circumstances and limited in ability yet an apparent few have tremendous freedom to go anywhere and do so much?
Dare to follow God. Find your place in the adventure God has for you.
In Summer Vacation – 7 Places That Make Fitness Fun All Season I invite you to quit focusing so much on the destination and instead dwell in the richness of each moment that God gives you – the dimension of the experience. It’s really not difficult to do, but as members of Blake Bramer’s 413 Fitness in Indiana have discovered in 6 Ways To Fit Out, you have to make the effort to be intentional. To do that requires something that is often counter intuitive to our go-go, push harder, I-can-have-more success driven agendas. It’s called living a life of prayer so you can find God and rest in the thin places, as Tricia McCary Rhodes shares in Thin Places And The REST Of Your Story. “Look deeper”, is the call David Jack gives to all of us in How I Found #myhappyplace2fit. He says, “things like connection, joy, laughter, friendship, kindness, patience and love” are the greater things we can find in real life fitness. These deeper qualities are the defining places that take people from failure to flourishing and from entrapment to freedom.
In God’s economy our happiness is in Christ. That is how your perspective shapes every place.
Where are you going with your fitness? I’m not just talking goals, outcomes and maintaining life balance. I invite you to take this lifestyle to new destinations. Go ahead, get outdoors (literally and figuratively from your usual routine). Dare to follow God to find a culture that is foreign to you. Find your place in the adventure God has for you.
Train strong in Christ,
Brad Bloom, Publisher
