You really can have Olympic-size faith

Yes, that’s our son, Jake, holding the official torch for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, California. During our rodeo travels that summer, we met the cross-country entourage in Oregon at a mountain summit café during breakfast. They graciously let Jake hold the torch for pictures.

This year as I watch the Summer Olympics in London, I’m amazed again by the athletes’ focused dedication and training. All of them struggle against pain and discouragement, yet they press on relentlessly toward their dreams.

What a perfect picture of our spiritual life. We, too, are called to a training regimen. (I Tim. 4:7 NIV)

Personally, I’m more inclined to cruise along thinking everything is going to work out with little effort on my part—until I run up against an athletic phrase that tells me otherwise.

“I press on toward the goal to win the prize …” (Phil 3:14 NIV).

I’m even told to exercise my faith.

“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling …” (Phil. 2:12 NKJ).

That verse isn’t talking about salvation by works; it’s talking about working out—exercising, using those faith muscles to build up our spiritual strength.

Do you sense the dedication, feel the strain?

Thank God, I don’t have to do it on my own. He who created man with the incredible potential for athletic prowess has Himself promised to help me in my weakness.

“For it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure” (Phil. 2:13 NKJ).

That sounds like a win-win to me!

A 1984 Summer Olympics torch runner in Oregon.

Getting from here to there

“Transition” is not one of my favorite words. It implies hard work, change, letting go of the familiar and heading into the unknown. It takes a person from what was to what will be and often involves pain. Biological mothers everywhere know exactly what I’m talking about.

So do daddies watching daughters glide down the aisle in white dresses, and employees leaving the nest of comfort on the wings of promotion. Transition is everywhere.

As a writer working on a fiction manuscript, I face it in nearly every scene. How does Fernando get from his Ford and into his front room? How does Paula get from dinners for one to picnics in the park? Transition.

And how do last month’s holiday cookie-eaters get from their sweatpants back into their dress pants? They call my son Jake.

Jake is a personal trainer who helps people change. He teaches them how to get from pudgy to perfect, and even uses special exercises called—you guessed it—transitional exercises.

For example, if a client is working muscle set A, and wants to move to muscle set B, Jake takes him from an exercise for set A, into an exercise that uses both set A and B, and then into one that uses only set B. Sounds logical, but it’s hard work.

We can’t get away from transition, and we shouldn’t want to. The push from here to there keeps us moving forward. It squeezes life out of boney winter branches into green spring buds, and builds strength into the flabby muscles of winter revelers.

Transition challenges us, even as we trade in an old, marked-up calendar for a nice new clean one.

Some people worry that 2012 will be the last page in mankind’s datebook. If it is, fine. If not, great. My life doesn’t hang on a round Mayan rock with no room for the future; it hangs on the cross of Jesus Christ who said He’d never let me out of His hand.

Transition is not easy, but we have Someone who promised to get us through it. As we take those first steps into 2012, let’s look to the God who knows what’s coming, and trust Him to take care of us along the way.

Behold, I make all things new. —Rev. 21:5 (NKJ)

Mom Arms

I have Mom Arms. You know – those upper limbs that come complete with built-in bat wings. I’m beginning to understand why my mother never wore sleeveless shirts in public.

As a writer, I do more heavy sitting than heavy lifting and my biceps and triceps have atrophied. Not the skin surrounding them, however.

I know exercise is important for a balanced life, but I detest going to the gym. I just can’t bring myself to drive 17 miles to town so I can work up a sweat in a big former Safeway supermarket with people I don’t know, slinging dead weight around and trying to hold my stomach in at the same time.

So I walk. Most mornings before sunrise, I tramp out a two-mile hike down the road and back again. But that doesn’t help my arms.

This morning My Son The Body-Builder put together a home-front workout regimen for me based on his own weight-lifting exercises. Since I don’t have to attach 100-pound weights to my lifting, a gallon of water or a loaded laundry basket will do just fine, he said.

“Resistance is what you want,” he explained. Demonstrating with a long rubber jump rope I bought years ago from Avon, he stood on the band, a handle from each end in each hand, and effortlessly stretched his arms above his head.

“Keep your elbows close to your head, and push slowly upward.”

I‘m good at slowly. I barely moved, so he showed me how to reduce the resistance for now and how to increase it later as my strength grows.

I don’t enjoy this resistance-pressure thing, but I know what little strength I have left will fade even more if I don’t do it. God knows it too, and He uses the human body as a great object lesson for the human spirit.

“You know that under pressure, your faith-life is forced into the open and shows its true colors,” says The Message. “Don’t try to get out of anything prematurely. Let it do its work so you become mature and well-developed, not deficient in any way” (James 1:2-4)

Well-developed: that’s how I want my Mom Arms to look. I guess it’s going to take a little workout.