“THEN SHALL THY LIGHT BREAK FORTH AS THE MORNING AND THINE HEALTH SHALL SPRING FORTH SPEEDILY.”
A rocking chair?.....It does not immediately come to mind as a piece of exercise equipment. We think of steps, exercise bikes, rebounders, and skipping ropes. But a rocking chair? Often, as people get older, they find movement difficult, but it is now thought that the movement and the push required to make the chair rock, however gently, can be important. To move the chair in a soothing rhythm, the big muscles of the leg have to work and the ankles and knees are flexed rhythmically. This unconscious exercise is helping the blood circulate and keeps more freedom of movement in all those joints.If a drug manufacturer developed a medication to bring down weight, lower stress, improve circulation, and greatly reduce the risk of a heart attack, it would hit the headlines!
THERE IS SUCH A REMEDY – AND IT HAS NO SIDE EFFECTS – EXERCISE!MOVEMENT:
Movement is essential for the human body. But somehow we find it so hard to build into our everyday lives. Each year fitness clubs open, leisure centres entice us with good offers, swimming pool attract us, but then our motivation goes and all the good resolutions get crowded out. Deep down, we still know that we should be exercising our bodies, for our hearts and general health.The only successful way to exercise consistently is to build it into our way of life, and not make it something special that requires changes of clothes, showers, or going out in the evening when the body is asking to rest.
BE HONEST – HAVE YOU BEEN HAPPILY OUT OF PUFF TODAY? LOOK AT THE LIST:
Walk with the children to School.....to bus stop or pickup point.Walk to the shops.Walk the dog (or even someone else’s dog!) at a brisk striding pace.Turn a piece of your garden into a place for Vegetables.Get an allotment.Help others in your area with their gardens.Take people with a disability swimming every week.More like this......
DID YOU NOTICE SOMETHING?
These are all non-competitive, or helpful to someone else, or provide a chance to talk to the children or take you among growing things of nature. So much exercise involves stress, for example, competition or pushing against records, embarrassment about how you will look to others. To make your mind and body happy and functioning is the main purpose of the additional movement – not to provide stress while you do it!
THE SECRET:
Do not tell anyone what you have chosen to do, so you do not think of it as an exercise programme. Make it just part of living. Working physically hard in a garden is especially satisfying. The reward is a job done, something productive accomplished, with something to look forward to. Any exercise which achieves this, as well as increased pulse rates, in true exercise.So exercise can help us decide more intelligently about how we will live our lives. That has to be a bonus in a pattern of total health.
BUT THERE IS AN EVEN MORE SERIOUS KIND OF EXERCISE...
It is one that guaranteed to bring confidence and hope into your life. The Holy scriptures contain many PROMISES.
But how do we access these promises? It requires exercise! Exercise of something called FAITH. We have a small amount of faith already – we trust friends, we trust that water will come out of tap! This faith is actually a gift from God, to us all, intended for use in linking us with our High Priest, so that we can receive the help HE offers. Sadly, we mostly use it only to reach to other weak human beings.
Faith can be pictured as another arm – a spiritual arm – that we can use to reach out to claim those promises of GOD.
As we tentatively exercise the arm of faith, reaching through the cloud of doubt (doubt if there is a GOD, doubt about His kindness may be?) to ask for these promises, our High Priest reaches down so gladly, to hold us strongly, giving us comfort, strength, forgiveness or help.
As with any exercise the more we claim, the stronger the ‘arm of faith becomes.
God Bless you all!