Ravines

Reading: 1 John 1:1-10

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”

--Aristotle

Every summer, my family and I take a trip to Breckenridge, Colorado. We do it old school style – we road trip. There’s something about turning onto I-25 and rolling down your windows at the top of Raton pass to feel a blast of cool air in late July. It’s just the summer break we need! Part of our road trip adventure takes us past Royal Gorge. If you’re not familiar, Royal Gorge is home to the highest suspension bridge in America. 956 feet below the bridge lies the Arkansas River, which has been carving its way through the canyon at a rate of one foot every 2,500 years. That’s right. It takes the Arkansas River 25 centuries just to carve through one foot of rock. What we often don’t realize is how much repetition it takes to build ravines.

Believe it or not, you have ravines too. A whole bunch of them. They are the neural pathways in your head better known as habits. Just like the Arkansas River has been at work, you’ve been at work too. In fact, some of your routines are so automatic you actually now use less brain power to execute them. All habits start like Royal Gorge did, with a little directed effort. The first time you decided to try CrossFit took some effort. You had to find a gym, find a class, get directions, meet the coach, figure out where to store your bag, and try not to get in anyone else’s way. But over time as you attended more and more workouts, the neural networks responsible for all those things grew stronger, to the point that you no longer really have to think about them. You associated the action of CrossFit with the outcome of fitness and when you got what you wanted, presto, you formed a habit.

You better sit down before I tell you this, because it may come as a shock to you. Researchers at Duke University say 45% of our daily behavior consists of habits. Almost one out of every two things you’ll do today is a habit. For some of you, reading this is one of your habits. When you get the notification that Building Spiritual Fitness has another blog post, you click, read, and digest. Thanks for that by the way! Consumer product companies also know the power of habits. In fact, their marketing experts believe habits are far better predictors of future behaviors than attitudes, intentions, or prior satisfaction. Aristotle was right – we are what we repeatedly do.

All of this means one thing – if you want to build ravines you need to start some new routines. It is not enough to think that tomorrow you’ll eat healthy. Because you won’t. Not without a new routine. Sure, you might hold it together for a day or two, but unless you make a new meal plan and buy healthy foods and purge the junk from the freezer and pantry, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Because your ravine for unhealthy eating is deeper than you think. Mine goes all the way back to childhood. I can trace it to a primary habit my parents helped form. Back then, I was known as “the human garbage disposal.” Not exactly a term of endearment I know. Essentially, when my father or mother or brother were finished eating, they would put their remaining food on my plate. In my parent’s eyes they were avoiding wasting food, but in my memory, the ravine of overeating was being carved.

We’re all battling ravines. But unlike the Royal Gorge, the ones in our heads can be reversed. Just don’t expect it to happen in 21 days. That’s like the biggest lie ever told. In truth, it can take eight to ten months to carve a new ravine. Notice how I eliminated the word habit from the action? You need to approach it like the river flows through the rock – with patience and persistence. You’re not building habits, you’re carving ravines. Every action you take, every negative thought you reject, one by one they all start to channel a new ravine in your neurological system.

In pursuit of a spiritually fit life, let me offer two ravines worth building. Some of you may have these but you need to build deeper neural channels. Some of you may need to rework your ravines altogether in order to make room for them. The first is embrace optimism. Let me let you on a little secret regarding pessimism. It sucks. Seriously. It sucks the air out of the room, the energy out of the conversation, and the life out of you. God didn’t fashion you for the purpose of pessimism. Because people who like to see the worst aspects in things or people basically have no hope, or they’ve put their hope in the wrong things. Learn to embrace optimism but putting your hope in Jesus. Not just in what Jesus has done, but what He’s doing in and through your life today.

The second is cast daily seeds. I think we all know how many crops the farmer will harvest who casts no seeds. Your words of encouragement to your kids, your acts of kindness to strangers, your offer of grace to those who’ve wronged you are all daily seeds. Think about some of the people who have had a big impact on your life. I bet you most of them can’t even remember what they did to impact you. But they took the time to cast some seeds. God offers you an unlimited supply of kindness and goodness, so why are you stockpiling it? There’s no Y2K for kindness and goodness. Cast daily seeds. It’s not important whether they take root, but they’ll never have a chance if you don’t put them out there.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”

--Aristotle

Questions for Reflection:

Describe the process of developing and starting a new routine in order to build a new ravine, or habit. Where are the pitfalls for you? What role do you ask God to play?

Of embracing optimism or casting daily seeds, which do you more consistently do and why?

Optimal Consumption

Reading: 1 Corinthians 9:19-27

Hey, I don’t want to waste your time. If you’re not really that interested in becoming spiritually fit, you should skip this post. In fact, I will be so not offended if you close this tab right now. But, if you decide to venture on, I want you to know there’s a possibility I may offend you. I’m pretty sure I offended myself just writing this! I’m not trying to call you out; I’m trying to coach you up. If we want to live a spiritually fit life, we must be willing to change even the smallest things. And by small, I don’t mean insignificant, I mean seemingly harmless. Let’s take a look at how our bodies function in the consumption of our spiritual lives.

First, let me define spiritual consumption. This isn’t something you eat or drink, those are both physical. Spiritual consumption is what’s filling your mind and your soul, and the gateways to both are the eyes and the ears. Essentially, the world around you is offering all kinds of content for you to consume, and all types of content providers. From podcasts to subscription services to social media, you literally have more content available to you than you ever have before. And believe it or not, all of it has an effect on your spiritual life.

Let me give you a working example, which has been researched and validated in more than one study. Let’s take the lovely news feed notifications on our phones. Who among us hasn’t seen the screen light up only to be invited to watch a fight in the mall at Bed, Bath, and Beyond, or a passenger brawl with a flight attendant? When you casually click those links and watch the content, something is happening in your brain. It’s a process known as desensitization. Neurologically, your brain is trying to figure out how to get you to look at less content like this. It is, trust me. That weird feeling in your gut you have or used to have when you saw violence is your body’s way of saying something isn’t right. The brain actually downregulates certain receptors which result in less of a “buzz” when you watch.

But here’s what we do. Instead of recognizing the unhealthy spiritual effects of what we consume, we chase the “buzz” by trying to consume more of it. Before long, you’ve binged the whole series, or your social media recognizes your new consumption pattern and starts offering you more violence or sales or sex or content or whatever is desensitizing you. For some of you, it’s simply never running out of content. All you want to do is keep scrolling to see what you’re missing, but you fly by the posts more obsessed with scrolling than reading. Next thing you know, you’re an angrier person, you spend money you don’t have, you pursue intimacy outside the bedroom, or you stay up late so no one knows your binging habit. On the outside you may appear totally fine, but inside your soul is sending you some smoke signals that trouble is on the way.

The great news is that downregulation can be reversed! They proved this in chronically obese people who had no interest in exercising. Researchers found because of their high exposure to food, these people had desensitized the receptors also responsible for stimulating exercise. When they reduced their food intake and slowly started exercising, despite a lack of interest, their receptors ‘woke up’ and over time became stimulated by exercise again. The same thing can happen to your soul. Try taking a daily or weekly inventory of your spiritual consumption. Do you notice any signs of desensitization? Do you find yourself overconsuming certain things more than you used to? If the answer is yes, then start to cut back. I find the easiest way to do that is with replacement. Replacement leads to restoration. All you need to do is replace what you’re consuming with something else. Instead of a few hours of mindless TV every night, try reading two nights a week or going without screens even one night a week. I have friends who set timers on their social media apps. When the time is up, the app locks out and they’re done until tomorrow. Again, this stuff might sound insignificant, but to an athlete in pursuit of fitness, all the little things matter.

Here’s why I said this article isn’t for everyone – because many people don’t want to think of these kinds of consumption patterns as spiritually unhealthy. And to be honest, if you don’t have a quality spiritual program of daily time with God in His word and with others, these tweaks aren’t going to take you anywhere. But, if you’re committed to a journey of spiritual fitness, and you’re looking for ways to enjoy more of the presence of God, these may be just the adjustments you need to live a life of Shalom.

Questions for Reflection:

When you consider your own content consumption patterns, do you find any that may be the result of desensitization?

Can you think of a consumption pattern you changed in order to spend more time with God? If so, what was it?

Training Cycles

Reading: Psalm 19:1-14

The first year of a new athletic pursuit is an exciting time. You become exposed to your new sport, purchase gear, and begin to make space in your life for a commitment to fitness. As a coach, I love celebrating an athlete’s first year of CrossFit. They’ve usually got a jump rope, a gym bag, some callouses, and most important, they have some training cycles under their belt.

Training cycles, like intervals, come in all shapes and sizes. I belong to a strength and conditioning gym where CrossFit programming is offered as our primary conditioning tool. Let me say it another way – we lift weights every day. And we don’t just lift them when the WOD calls for them, instead strength training cycles are independently programmed in the gym weekly. Some of you work out in similar gyms, where you essentially do two workouts in each class, a “Strength,” and then the WOD. While training cycles vary in design, length, and intensity, they all share three core components – load, recovery, and adaptation. Let’s break these three components down and look at them from both a physical and spiritual perspective.

In physical fitness, load is exactly what you think it is, weight. But it’s not just weight, it’s the number of times an athlete will move the weight combined with the distance the weight will travel all held together by a time cap. This is the formula for fitness. In spiritual fitness, load is a combination of deliberate disciplines, or exercises combined with the stress and struggle of everyday life. What many athletes fail to realize is the high overlap in their bodies between the physical work in the gym and the demands of life. Which is why you need the second component of the training cycle, recovery.

Contrary to the whole “sleep when you’re dead” philosophy espoused on social media, recovery is a good thing. You need to recover. And I like to look at recovery in two distinct ways. First, there’s micro-recovery. Think of this as the 23 hours between workouts, or your rest days. I think we learned just how little recovering we were doing when COVID shut the world down. All of a sudden, we were sleeping longer, doing less outside the house, and prior to remote learning for the kids or the novelty of Zoom wearing off, it was a generally slower time. But you also need to consider macro-recovery. These are longer periods of recovery, usually five to seven days. I try to plan these around vacations where it makes sense. I already know I’m going to be away from the gym, so I give my body a physical break from training and just enjoy being active. A quality training cycle should address both.

Recovery needs to happen in your spiritual life as well. Now I don’t mean taking a two-week break from the reading the Bible, but yes, I am going to encourage you to switch things up. Otherwise, you’ll get stuck in a rut you think is a routine. If it’s difficult for you to read every day, make a plan to read for a few weeks straight, then take some time to recover. You’ve also got to realize the load of life and plan some recovery time there as well. Maybe summer camps for the kids can wait two weeks so no one has to be up early prepping meals and delivering kids. Maybe you need that marriage retreat with your spouse more than you think you do. Maybe you just need to put up some boundaries for a few weeks, giving yourself permission to say “no” so that you can say “yes” to more quality time with God. Because that quality time without load makes way for the third component of a training cycle, adaptation.

Just like your physical body adapts, so does your spiritual body. I can’t tell you how much I love spiritual transformations. Well, I guess you probably know since it’s like what I do for a living. And this is where your close community of friends on this journey with you become so important. It’s not always that easy to see changes in our own bodies. Usually someone else points them out to us. The community is there to encourage one another. Healthy communities are built on encouragement. When you see spiritual change in your community or family, affirm it. When people see change in you, receive it. Adaptation is the spiritual growth God supplies for the next training cycle on your horizon.

And then the cycle repeats – load, recovery, and adaptation. Spiritual fitness is a journey to conform our hearts to the image of Christ as we live a life ordered in and around the rhythm of God. And it’s made up of hundreds, if not thousands of these cycles. When you’re ready to discover more of who you are or what you’re capable of, God will be there with a training cycle.

Questions for Reflection:

How aware are you of the recovery component of your spiritual life? Do you practically engage in it?

What are some of the adaptations you’ve seen in your spiritual life? Can you correlate them to a practice you started, or a life struggle you faced?