Getting Started

So, I read Blue Like Jazz along with everyone else and I just wasn't that impressed. The story about the Reed College confessional booths was pretty cool, but otherwise the "Wait, Christians can be Democrats!?" vibe turned me off. And he seemed like an anti-intellectual, which threatened me as a toddler-like intellectual. JD reads his blog and suggested I do the same. You might have noticed, I'm a big JD-fan, so I sucked up my prejudice and went for it. I still don't quite see what everyone gets so excited about, except that Don seems like a genuine, honest dude just trying to figure out what it means to live in Jesus' world on Jesus' terms. His blog post today about exercise does a WAY better job than I could ever do of illustrating our general anticipation of how to go about embracing radical Christian, abundant, Kingdom living.

It starts by relaxing into the grace into the fact that we're still just beginners, and God's grace means that, in a certain sense, as long as we show up everyday listening, everything else is extra.

But I'll let Don tell you what he means:

Dave (my personal trainer friend) explained to me, though, that if I showed up at the gym and got my heart rate up for twenty minutes, I’d worked out. He said I needed to do that every day, and if I did, I had nothing to feel guilty about. He then told me to come back the next day, and we’d do the same workout, only increase it a little bit. The next day we rode for twenty minutes and he congratulated me on working out two days in a row. Then he asked if I wanted to do anything extra. I did, of course, so we ended up doing a mildly difficult workout with weights. Within a month, Dave was working me out so hard I once had to stop him and ask if I could go out in the alley behind the gym to throw up. And no kidding, he moved the rest of the workout into the alley so I wouldn’t throw up on his floor. But he kept working me out, always reminding me that what we were doing was extra, that I’d already finished my workout.

Go check out Don Miller's blog here