Today was “fun day”.  It’s a beautiful spring day with pleasant temperatures and sunny, my favorite kind of day.  It is also a planned “rest” day to allow recovery as I enter this next tapering week before my race next Saturday.  But it was just too nice to stay inside and not get out and do something, so I went for a fun ride on the bicycle.  I just went for a simple ride to enjoy the pretty day.  I saw the grass greening up, trees beginning to bud out, robins and song birds chirping about, smelled someone burning leaves after cleaning up their yard, and just had fun on the Ole Blue Goat.  Just like when I was a kid, going nowhere in particular. I even took some time to stop along the way and just look around.  I didn’t worry about pace, speed, breathing, cadence, heart rate or any of those training parameters, just plain fun.  And how enjoyable it was!  I was refreshed after a one and a half hour ride, not winded, not sweaty, no sore muscles, but felt good.

Now my last blog I talked about how we have it so easy and it is tempting to just take the easy way out.  Now on the surface it may seem like I’m contradicting myself today, but not really.  I worked hard all week, and will have just a couple of training runs this week as I taper down, but today was not about doing work; today was about enjoying life.  Too often we are focused on the work of fitness.  We spend our energy diligently training for that run or ride, developing technique or stamina, working to the point of mechanical or metabolic failure.  Sure we take time to recover, rest the muscles and mind, and allow time to build, but how often do we just go out and enjoy the activity without worrying about getting some specific result?  Taking a rest day to just have fun, light activity without as much focus on results, can actually improve our performance.

While out riding for fun today I was thinking about this in relation to our faith.  God made man for relationship with Him.  I have often wondered what it must have been like for Adam to walk with God in the “cool of the day”!  Can you imagine?  Just walking along the path or field taking a leisurely stroll with God, talking about little and big things. I wonder if He misses that with us sometimes?  How often is it we just commune with Him for “fun”?  We always seem to have an agenda, don’t we?  We need this, help with that, deliverance from this.  I think that maybe sometimes God wants us just to “take a stroll” with Him.  How would you like it if every time your friend came over they were constantly asking for something?  Or they were always engrossed in questioning the deep things of life?

Now that doesn’t mean we can just be superficial all the time, but I do think it would do us good to sometimes come to Him without an agenda, without expectation, just a chance to fellowship together.  In Genesis 3:8 it says when He came to walk in the cool of the day that He called to the man, “where are you?”.  It seems He was missing His friend, Adam.  Jesus came so that we might come back into right relationship with God.  Are you cultivating that relationship?  Joseph Ludgate wrote an old hymn in the late 19th Century called “Friendship With Jesus”.  The first verse and chorus go like this:

A friend of Jesus! Oh, what bliss
That one so weak as I
Should ever have a Friend like this
To lead me to the sky!

• Refrain:
  Friendship with Jesus!
  Fellowship divine!
  Oh, what blessed, sweet communion!
  Jesus is a Friend of mine.

Take time out of your work out routine to occasionally just have fun, smell the roses as it were.  The same in our spiritual life and relationship with God.  Enjoy each other’s company, just for the friendship of it.  You will likely find yourself growing closer to Him than you imagine.