Pedometers, Prayer Walking and the Bible on the Hoof | Dreaming Beneath the Spires

I love the idea of leverage: actions which yield (financial, psychological, physical, or creative) benefits out of all proportion to the time they take.

I started thinking in those terms when I founded my micro-publishing business. Given that I had limited time, how could I best use my time, talent, energy and money to make the most repeatable income? Now, my husband runs our family business—and I am beginning to apply these ideas to our daily life.

What small changes can I make in my daily life which will yield big benefits? Being tidy and decluttering is one. Paying off my mortgage and investing even small surpluses is another. Healthy eating. And exercise!!

  “Exercise is good for you in almost every way,” as an article in today’s New York Times said. It returns the time expended many times over in deeper sleep, improved concentration and cognitive  function, better mood, and probably increased creativity.

The only problem with exercise (for me!) is the doing of it! By temperament, I’d happily stay in bed with my laptop and books, and have a pj day everyday.

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Ah, the only way to change one’s life is to initiate several small micro-changes in one’s daily habits.

So I did two things. I got an Omron pedometer, supposedly the best pedometer. 10,000 steps a day (5 miles over the course of the day) is meant to be enough for basic fitness.

I have been steadily increasing this—am at 8000 now–and will reach 10,000 before our holiday in Istanbul this weekend. Sadly, one cannot reach 10,000 steps in the course of a normal day’s activities.  Most people reach a mere 3000. It takes one or two walks.

And how do I find the time for that?

The experience of praying on the hoof is different. It calls for quite an adjustment. Prayer walking, around the perimeters of our 1.5 acre property, and then on the fields and farms around us, is more distracting, especially in my own orchard and huge vegetable garden, as I see things which need to be done. My thoughts wander far more than when in my room, face down, in an attitude of surrender.

And, it’s April now. It’s spring.

 Robert Browning wrote. Indeed! As I walk through our woods, and field after field, up on the ridge, surveying Garsington, and the hills around Oxford, and the birds sing, and the trees break forth into songs of blossom, I feel ecstatic. Full of joy breaking forth.

I pray, or maybe the beauty of the day prays through me in glorious praise. It’s not me and the Lord having a little business meeting, or a tutorial, or editorial session or a mentoring session as when I pray about my other concerns. It’s me speechless, just praising God (in tongues!) for the beauty and the loveliness and the joy in the air. (I live in the country, in a particularly lovely part of lovely Oxfordshire, IMO.)

Ah, Glorious distraction. It is perhaps no coincidence that the only instructions (I can think of) that Jesus gave us as to where we should pray was this,
But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Mt. 6:6.

But because I have been trying to shift weight, and have only shifted 6.5 pounds in the last 3 months, I need to continue to make daily changes. And so making a sedentary activity I do daily an ambulatory one will be a good change. As well as helping me towards that elusive 10,000 steps on the pedometer.

I guess I will have to rely on some of the old “formulae” for prayer—such as the Lord’s Prayer– to keep my thoughts focussed. Andrew Wingfield-Digby, Vicar of St. Andew’s, Oxford, which we’ve attended for a year (and former chaplain of England’s cricket team and currently head chaplain of the international team of chaplains at the 2012 London Olympics) goes on two prayer walks a day, and his formula is TRIP, thanksgiving, repentance, intercession, praise, which I think I will use. The old one ACTS has language too outdated for me to connect with—adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, supplication.

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I have also been jogging (well, to be accurate, trying to jog) 3 days a week for the last few months, while listening to the Bible in a Year on my iPhone. So I am almost up to date with that.

I think the Bible needs a good editor!! Putting unedited Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy so early on makes it hard to persevere and get to the better stuff.

Perhaps listening while jogging is the best way to go. You enjoy the hints of the coming Christ; you enjoy the symbolism which Christ will enact, like the blood of the lamb on the gate posts to avert the angel of death; the scapegoat who goes into the wilderness bearing the sins of the people; and the Day of Atonement–but you have the consolation of the endorphins and your body’s “grateful pain,” happiness in its discomfort, to comfort you as jog along through the endless rules and regulations of Leviticus.

Am on Deuteronomy 30 now, so happy to report that I have womanfully jogged through Numbers and Leviticus and most of Deuteronomy!