Dog Park Evangelism

I've had a good week so far :o) Yesterday several people contacted me to take care of business that I've been putting off and so I was able to mark a couple of things off my inner "there are so many things on this list" list that I crumple into a heap and never get to even one of the things. Swims have been good this week. I've been keeping them shorter but really working on drills and slowing down. Yes, slowing down I think is going to be better for me in getting my speed up in the long run. I have a 6 mile run today and a 60 minute ride tomorrow before the bigger workouts of the weekend. The DOMS in my legs from Monday's workout is finally leaving and I'm able to navigate the stairs this morning :o)

I don't talk about dog park much but I'm there a lot - at least 4 times a week probably. You meet almost as many eccentric people at DP (used to be code for Dog Park in front of the pooch until she caught on ;-) as you will in the sauna at the gym. One of my favorite people at DP is Nancy. She has an airedale - possibly the naughtiest airedale around. Ki loves to bite Oscar's tail and hold on while he's wrestling the bigger dogs. I was talking to her about how I got pulled over a couple weeks ago on my way home from church and how funny Mai was about thinking I was going to jail, etc and she started asking me about church and then another lady kind of evesdropped into the conversation and the next thing I know, Nancy is attending church last weekend and loving it!

I am no evangelist, but I think that one of the things that has become really important in my life is letting people know that I'm a Christian, certainly by acting like it, although that one is hard! But also by being open about it. One of the things I really enjoy is when I meet someone, whether it be on a blog or in real life and I hear them giving glory to God, not keeping their Christianity a secret, but making it a normal everyday part of them.

I used to be turned off by people in my teens and 20s and 30s by goody-two-shoes type of Christians, but even though I didn't want to be, I've always been turned on by some of the most out-spoken Christians who you can just feel are filled up with giving glory to God. When I found BFL, I was part of a BFL Board started by a Christian woman and once in a while she would bring up God or the Bible or Satan and I was SO TURNED off by it (HEY! I'm here to get fit, not hear you talk about the bible!). Guess what, this same woman, on the opposite side of the country, found my church for me and helped me learn about God in a completely different way than ever before.

In PDL Day 8 the QTC is: What common task could I start doing as if I were doing it directly for Jesus? I think that through this study we are all starting to realize that everything we do IS that much better when we do it for Jesus. When was the last time you did something that brought glory to God that sucked? It might have been tough to do or felt like a struggle all the way through, but you did and wasn't the end result worth it?

Here is what I do - I have to do the frickin' laundry, right? I hate it - I decide to talk to God while I'm doing it, and before you know it, I'm done! Perfect right? Worked out great - got my chore done, got some good time in talking with God. Two minutes later, after such a great laundry episode, my husband says something to tick me off, and now it's 8 hours later and I'm in bed and realize I haven't talked to, let alone thought of God again that day. So I think that the common task that I want to start doing as if I were doing it directly for Jesus is all my everday tasks - I need to make that one task a day become two become three until my day is less about me and my emotions and just getting the job done and more about being a steady hum of giving thanks to my saviour for not only all that He has placed in my care, but for the fact that He is in my life and that nothing in this world should hold my attention over Him. There is nothing in this world that I want to hold my attention more than Him.

I think I skipped by QTC for Day 6: How should the fact that life on earth is just a temporary assignment change the way I am living right now?
I'm going to come back to this tonight.

As St. Irenaeus said, "The glory of God is a human being FULLY ALIVE!"