40 Days

Riding has been great this week.  I backed off the endurance a little and made a tempo ride and a threshold ride my main workouts of the week.  Yesterday doing the threshold effort I surprised myself and matched my best ever time up the 40 minute climb to old camp.  Speaking of 40, I just finished up this post that I started writing about a week ago.

40 Days is a spiritually significant amount of time in several stories throughout the bible.  Saddleback Church uses a 40 day campaign each year to build the spiritual growth of it's members.  A couple weeks ago as Pastor Rick was teaching about the 7 principles behind the current "40 Days in the Word" campaign, I realized they all relate to physical training in the same way they relate to spiritual growth.

Spiritual growth / physical training is:

1. Intentional: You have to want it and decide to do it.

2. Incremental: Growth and training takes steps.  You can't reach your goals in one big effort.  You need to take multiple steps and make multiple small improvements.  This is hopefully common sense to most people into endurance sports.  It's refreshing spiritually though.  We might be saved as soon as we receive Christ, but it can take a lifetime of small steps to become more like him.

3. Personal: Everybody is different and we all need to do slightly different training to grow stronger physically and spiritually. Some of us respond better to endurance training while others get more benefit from short intense workouts.  Spiritually some of us need to share and talk with others about their experiences, while some of us need quiet reflection and time to reason through things.

4. Habitual: To improve you need to train enough that it becomes part of your daily routine and part of your lifestyle.  If you aren't consistent you aren't going to get very far.  

5. Relational: You can't do it alone.  We all need support and feedback from others.

6. Multi-dimensional: Both spiritual and physical growth will overlap with many aspects of your life.  You can't do everything else the same and add in an extra hour of training 5 times per week.  You also need to adjust other things like rest and diet.  It's the same spiritually, the stronger you become, the more your faith will start to affect how you work, who you hang out with, and more.

7. Seasonal: Obviously there is a main competitive season for all sports.  Endurance athletes are also familiar with periodization in training and resting.  I've recently been learning that the same can be said for spiritual growth. That's pretty cool to hear if you're like me and the strength of your faith varies sometimes.  It's normal to sometimes feel closer to God and other times feel farther from him.  Sometimes this goes on for days, week, or even months.  What's important is that God is who you ultimately turn to for grace and strength and that each time you turn back your relationship with Him grows stronger.