Before heading out on this cycling trip, one thing I was curious about was how “God would show up” and I was really excited to “find Him” in different ways.

Anyway, I thought I had it figured out, this “God showing up” thing. In my fantasy I was leaning head-down into the wind, pathways of sweat cutting across my face and rolling off into the road behind me. I heard the vibration of my bike moving across hot asphalt as blades of grass and insects buzzed next to my feet. My chest moved in and out as my lungs expanded and emptied with each breath. I felt the movement of God in me. I felt alive.

We’re now on our fourth week of this trip and my God-fantasy is just that. A fantasy. There have been no magic burning bushes or epiphanies had on the open roads. In fact, it’s maybe been the opposite.

And as expected, the unexpected has happened.

Physically, the heat and climbing escalated my almost-fixed-but-evidently-not-quite heart problem. That knocks me out from riding every mile on certain days with big climbs or 100 degree plus weather.

Didn’t see that coming.

On top of that, the day before two really great rides in Texas, a component of my bike broke to an extent I couldn’t effectively ride. Chris and I had planned to do our first century rides together into Anson, TX (which is close to where I went to high school) but because I couldn’t get my bike fixed before that day, I ended up driving the van.

In keeping a healthy perspective, my unplanned time in the van isn’t really a big deal. Before my heart surgery, simply walking to the van would have been tough. So riding 30 miles, 50 miles, 80 miles…any miles, really…is beyond anything I could have hoped for a year ago.

But my perspective isn’t always healthy.

I’ve been fighting with my “ideal” self – the athlete I was before my heart problems. I know my muscles are strong and can handle these long miles. Except for the literal pain in the butt from sitting on a six-inch seat for seven hours, nothing really hurts.

If only my heart worked right, this wouldn’t be such a struggle for me.

If only…

The unexpected has thrown my spiritual fantasy out the door as well. And once again, it has to do with my heart.

What I expected is something emotional. Cathartic. Exciting. Clear. Maybe even miraculous in an obvious way. I’m supposed to be writing another book and planning my future as an author and speaker. I wait each day, hoping for a revelation on what I’m supposed to do when I get back in August and each night go to bed as empty handed as I woke up.

If only…

What I am realizing is the extent I let my expectations control me. My heart – both physically and spiritually – had formed expectations for this trip. Expectations that aren’t being met. I’ve spent so much of my spiritual life coasting from a mountain top to a valley and back up again, so I only expect to see God at the top or at the bottom on a roller coaster.

What happens when there is no roller coaster?

What happens when the land of my spirit is flat?

How do I find Him?

And when I don’t “feel” Him…where do I turn?

Quite honestly, I find myself turning the other way.

(Evidently I am not gifted with patience.)

“What? You’re not here? Okay. Fine. I’m gonna try running over there to find you.”

I’m left breathless and exhausted at the end.

My heart…It’s not perfect.

It beats too fast sometimes.

It gets anxious.

It doesn’t like to wait.

It likes to experience the highs and lows, but never the middle.

The middle is too quiet. Too tame.

And as such, too threatening to my comfort.

In the same way I can’t control how my physical heart functions, I can’t control how God shows Himself, or how I see him.

What happens when God isn’t a feeling? When He isn’t a high or an adrenaline rush or a moment of clarity when I expect Him to be?

God simply is, and I need to simply be.

I need to realize that in that holy moment of simply being, it’s not about my expectations.

It’s about His.

Resting.

Existing.

Living.

Being.

Right here. Right now.

In this moment.

With this heart beat.

And this one.

And that’s all He wants (and expects) of me.

—-

One final post (although I wish I could do many more!) on the book we’ve been talking about, In Praise of Slowness. This book is so rich in wisdom, in inspiration, and is just so darn well-written (and currently still $6 on Amazon) I seriously can’t recommend it enough. It has done for me what Seth Godin’s work did for me five or six years ago – it adds a “lens” through which I view how I live part of my life out.

In a chapter on food, we learn that the true meaning of the word “companion” is “sharing bread with someone”…and if you go back and look through the responses of our survey on food, you’ll notice a few people wish to slow down and simply share a meal with family or friends.

That makes total sense. How often do you hear, “Gosh, I wish that dinner was so much shorter. I hated every minute of the food, the company, the conversation…” Instead, when you have these slower-paced dinners, or even a meal out with friends, the time flies, and you’ve suddenly found yourself at that table for three hours.

And you want more of that.

Another large theme was simply eating healthier. Going more local/natural, etc. A common excuse for this is money, and at first glance, sometimes it seems like you pay a lot more going to Whole Foods for a lot less food, than if you went to Wal-Mart (who yes, may carry organic food — but I avoid for other reasons) or Kroger.

We all know, for the most part, the quality of the Whole Foods-ish products is better, is fair-trade, not made by an eight year old in a sugar field, and more than likely is organic. If you’ve been to a Farmer’s Market, you know some things (meats, pastas, sauces, cheeses) can be a bit pricey.

So why pay $16/lb for some steak at your Farmer’s Market when you can get it for half that at Wal-Mart?

The obvious answer is quality. I could literally drive to the farm we get our meat from at the Farmer’s Market and see how it’s made from start to finish. I actually plan on doing this later this summer. If you’ve ever seen Fast Food Nation or Supersize Me (free on Hulu) or The Future of Food (free on Hulu) or any of the other food-advocate type movies, you see the terrible way most food in most supermarkets or chain stores is grown, what pesticides and preservatives are on them, what hidden salts, sugars, syrups, and chemicals they’re laced with, how the animals are given steroids and treated, where your fast food really comes from and what it does, and the way that all of this is disguised to the public.

I am NOT a conspiracy theorist. But since we have been paying a little more for quality food, it’s amazing how we feel. And we also realize with the amount of eating out we were doing: a $6 bag of Farmer’s Market pasta that will make eight servings is still less than one value meal at Chick-fil-A.

We don’t mind paying for convenience. That’s the way our culture of busyness has been tricked into thinking healthy things are expensive while we are actually paying so much more for so much less every time we eat out.

Total perspective.

Organic produce, or any produce you can trace back to its origins (and not have to worry if the same chemical they use to make Agent Orange is the pesticide they sprayed on your lettuce) is fairly inexpensive. Buy a few tomatoes, add some herbs, simmer them up, and all of the sudden you have fresh, organic tomato sauce for $2-3 instead of paying $6-12 for the organic kind in a jar. That’s just one example of something you can make that’s less expensive, and better for you, than getting something in a bright colored jar.

Chris and I have decided to stick to the following rules when it comes to food. Exceptions are always made. Nobody can pull this off perfectly, but the exceptions to the rules are few and far between.

• Know where the food came from
• Read the ingredients
• Craving XYZ restaurant? How can we make this at home for less?
• PLAN AHEAD and shop according to that plan
• Just stay away from the processed stuff.
• Buy local when possible (especially produce and meat!)
• If at all possible, use the oven or stove and not the microwave, even though it takes longer.

Cooking takes time. And energy. And some days you don’t have that energy. But what can be adjusted in your schedule so you have an hour set aside to cook? Or can you spend a couple hours one night, or on a weekend cooking ahead of time so you have something healthy already to go on the days when life is crazy.

The affordability issue — for most people — ourselves included — is a priority thing. A family will typically spend more money on entertainment or things like cell phone bills than they do on food. Buying cheap food now may seem like the answer, but with all those strange chemicals racing around in our bodies, it won’t be the answer in the long run when someone has to get treated for obesity related diseases, or because of all the chemicals we’ve slowly been ingesting.

It’s important to think about the long-term effects this will have on us, our children (who have a shorter life-expectancy than we do…!) instead of the short-term fix of a quick meal in front of the TV before we rush off to doing something that in reality, may not be as important that sharing healthy food, and celebrating that element of creation and nature, with the people we’ve been given in life.

“I could never do what you’re doing!” I told a guy named Cody at a church in Dallas. I was speaking there and he had just cycled in with the Ride:Well team, a group of fifteen or so people who were biking across the country.

Rattling off a list of reasons (including a very legit heart issue) he told me to one, get my heart fixed…and two, do the ride.

So last summer I made the vow. If I could get my heart fixed, I’d do it.

And my heart got fixed.

And I signed up for the ride.

We begin the ride across the country for Blood:Water Mission on June 6, but as part of my training, Thursday I, along with two other cyclists will be riding 100 miles (also known as a century ride).

They’ve done it before. In fact, one of them just rode 165 miles a few weekends ago.

I’ve only gone 50 miles. Once.

Most of my rides are 15-25 miles long. I think I had a 36 miler in there too.

But 100?

I twittered about it Wednesday and had so many people say, “I could NEVER do that!”

Yeah – me too! I’m still thinking this is a crazy idea!

But here’s the deal.

I CAN.

YOU CAN.

If me, a non-athletic, pasty white, nerd-author girl can ride a bike 100 miles, so can you.

Or maybe it’s not cycling, but there’s something you’ve been putting off.

But you need to do it.

You have a choice – say YES to the unknown, the scary, the uncomfortable, the exhilarating, the embarrassing, and you will be saying YES to an adventure you could never in a million years dream up.

So, you may not be riding 100 miles today (in 90* weather, with 60% humidity — not that I’m paying attention to my Weather App…) but in solidarity, would you do SOMETHING a little out of the norm today?

If you’d like to see where we’re riding, you can click here.

If you want to donate to our ride (the money doesn’t go TO us, it goes to support Blood:Water mission) you can click here.

And for the love, tell us what’s one crazy thing you want to do, or one crazy thing you’re going to do today!

I’ll be back as quickly as possible to continue the series on slowness and let you know how the ride went! You can follow my Twitter here to know the latest!

If there is one thing you could change about your relationship with food, what would it be?

Would it be what you ate?

What you didn’t eat?

How much or how little you eat?

Where you eat?

How fast you eat?

Where the stuff you eat comes from?

Who you eat it with?

Or…..(you fill in the blank)…

For me, I wish I would eat more regularly instead of at random times. I also wish I could say no to chocolate at times. Or pasta. And I’m trying to eat more locally and once we get back from our trip, plant some herbs. (Until then, we steal from our neighbors – they know.) Fast food really isn’t a big problem for me because I’ve watched enough documentaries on it that it just grosses me out. But sometimes in airports, it’s the only thing around.

So…go. What would you change?

In case you’re new around these parts, I wrote a book called Mad Church Disease that came out last year. It’s about how I literally burned out while working at a church because I didn’t know how to manage my time or my stress.

I ended up in the hospital for a week as my body just…inflamed…itself. I was having panic attacks, was unable to treat my depression adequately, had withdrawn from relationships (including my new marriage — who had time?) and at the center of it, left no time for spiritual connection or growth.

It has been five years since that burnout, and slowly and clumsily I’ve been trying to be a better steward of my time and resources. I fail often, but when I do, it’s with gusto.

Many people place their priorities in a hierarchical manner. Like:

1. God/Faith
2. Spouse/Partner
3. Children
4. Extended Family
5. Career
6. Leisure/Friends

Remember last week when we talked about how time in developed countries is linear? This is a prime example of how we try to work in items onto our timeline based on priority.

Let’s be real with each other for a moment.

Life is crazy and more often than not, if we look at this list of priorities they often fall out of line.

Career comes first for many of us, even if it’s not our intent. We combine things as well, like family and leisure (think weekend baseball games, recitals, etc.) or faith and career (say, if you work in a church).

These things get all jumbled up. Because we can’t make sense of them anymore, it’s difficult to put them in our linear timelines. We get stressed out, frazzled, and rushed, and just throw things where they randomly fit.

Instead of viewing these parts of our life in a hierarchy, what if we viewed them cyclically?

Let’s compare this to a bicycle.

Most of us would agree that faith is the most important part of our lives, so imagine that as the middle – the axle. If our spiritual life stays healthy and strong, the other things – the spokes – are able to function in harmony and move us forward.

When you ride a bike, you don’t check off each rotation of the wheel like a to-do list. You simply arrive at your destination.

If the axle on my bike is damaged in some way, the spokes don’t carry the weight properly, which causes the tire to bend, which will then send me flying over the handlebars. Or the frame may come loose off the axle. Either way…

Crash.

Sometimes a spoke gets messed up. Sometimes things in our lives don’t go as planned. But when that happens, you don’t crash. You can ride cautiously until you get it fixed. Or you can even walk your bike to where you’re going. It’s not ideal.

But it’s not a crash.

While this post doesn’t come directly out of the book we’ve been studying the last week (In Praise of Slowness), I think in order to get to the root of our stress and feeling rushed we need to take a look at how we spend our time.

How do you view time and priorities? Linearly or cyclically? Are you moving forward, or do you feel stuck? Is everything rotating around what’s most important in your life or are you wondering where all the time went?