Simple Ain’t Easy
Endurance is not my specialty, except in the limited domains of board games and video games. I can easily spend 2 hours in a game of Settlers of Catan or spend 200 hours in the latest Legend of Zelda installment. I’ve even started giving up on reading as I become a powerhouse YouTube watcher. I’ve been trying to turn this around with Exodus90, completing the rigorous preparation for Easter since 2020 but also wishing that there was a simpler way to improve the other 275 days of the year.
God of Endurance
Dan Burke and Chase Crouse nicely filled this need with their book The God of Endurance: A Practical Guide for Incorporating Exercise and Nutrition into Your Spiritual Journey. It is a quick read at 108 pages and lays out their simple plan for steadily improving your health. Simple doesn’t mean easy, however, as some of their advice hits on things that I’ve been “working on” for decades. Their forthright formulations are easily absorbed but convicting to my inner monologue which tells me that I’m improving my protein intake and performing more intentional activity so I can definitely have a second bowl of ice cream.
As a software systems engineer, I often find my days committed to small, sustainable improvements that don’t lose sight of the bigger picture. This book fits very nicely in both of those niches. The authors lay out a plan that is doable, suggesting small ways to improve endurance and gradually build toward bigger goals, all while keeping in mind that life is a marathon and ensuring that each step helps your health changes fit organically into your life. They also show that this not only affects your physical life but your spiritual life.
Practical and Focused
These aspects complement each other in small ways, like working out while praying, and in big ways, like treating a spiritual director as important as a personal trainer. Practical tips like praying the rosary during walks are great and there are many sprinkled throughout. I would love to see a follow up book that goes a bit further down this path, with an even deeper dive into the connection between physical and spiritual improvement. It’s a topic that I think we all need to hear in different ways, at different times.
Overall, the focus on physical improvement as a way to offer a better self-gift to those around us is much appreciated and a welcome change from the few other physical improvement books that I’ve read which tend to focus on health and vanity. I’ll be working to improve my self-gift by adding protein and giving up the ice cream… eventually.
Written by Jim Volpe. Jim lives in eastern PA with his wife Jen and their five children. Jim and Jen have been a CCL Teaching Couple for 20 years and Jim is a FSI coach. When not teaching NFP, Jim enjoys board games, video games, splitting wood, and software engineering. Jim is also a CCL board member. This column was first seen in Family Foundations magazine.