Sometimes in this modern age of entertainment it feels like going outside is a punishment reserved for punishing unruly children who have lost their screen time priveleges.
Just this week I heard myself hollering “Stop hitting your brother. Go outside!”
But is it possible, or even beneficial, to default to outdoors? In an age when the indoors offer every comfort and distraction we could ask for, what does it look like to encourage and even equip our children for the wonder and amazement of outdoors?
Today we’ll look at two time-tested classics for introducing young hearts and minds to the lessons and fun of outdoor play, sports and time in nature, as well as how we can begin to step outside with intentional, if little, steps.
Show Notes:
Where you can start:
- Get outside 10-15 minutes
- Pause and take time to pay attention to the details outside. Spark some wonder.
- Family trip with lots of things to do outdoors
Ways to listen:
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🎧 search Gospel Tech in your favorite streaming service (iTunes, Amazon)
Transcription:
Hello everyone and welcome to the Gospel Tech podcast. My name is Nathan Sutherland and this podcast is dedicated to helping families love God and use tech. Today our conversation is the third and final one on analog adventures. It’s about getting outside. We’re going to talk about sports and nature with this idea of analog adventures, being ways that we can engage fun in real life at the pace of real life without external programming that guides us along, or behavioral hooks that trick us into giving our time, our focus or our money. But instead, it’s some of the real life that God’s designed us for and it’s a great way to reset and recalibrate some of our behaviors, some of our habits, and redirect some of our energy that might be getting negative or might be great, but we want to add things to it. Analog adventures are a wonderful way to do that.
So today’s conversation, get outside, sports and nature. I’ll be sharing some of my sports bias for why I’m a big fan of sports, but also looking at what does it look like to get into nature alone or with our families and how can we make that a regular rhythm that doesn’t have to be some superhuman adventure or I’ve already used the word adventure, so superhuman effort, how about that? But instead can be something we can do naturally and we can begin to build our family towards and find new ways to have fun together in that way. So that’s our conversation. With no further ado, let’s get this conversation started.
Welcome to the Gospel Tech podcast, a resource for parents who feel overwhelmed and outpaced as they raise healthy youth in a tech world. As an educator, parent and tech user, I want to equip parents with the tools, resources, and confidence they need to raise kids who love God and use tech.
Thank you to everyone who’s helped make this podcast possible. Thank you for listening, for liking, for sharing and subscribing. Subscribing so you don’t miss any new content. And thank you for leaving ratings and reviews. Out of five stars, we’d love a five star review because I am trying to make five star content here and with the review, it helps people read why you liked it. If something has 50 ratings, it’s cool to be able to go through the reviews and go, oh, here’s some of the reasons it got that rating. That’s super helpful for us. So thank you for doing that. And if you have not yet and you’re a regular listener, would you please consider doing that? Today’s conversation, get outside. This is our third analog adventure conversation and this one is specifically focused on how can we go out into the worlds around us and find something that will meet the needs of either our kids or our family.
There’s the two areas, we have sports on one side, it’s organized and we’ll talk about the benefits of sports and we have nature on the other side, it’s not organized well. I mean it is, but it’s not organized by any individual that we have to deal with in our neighborhood. There’s no coach to email. There is a great designer and loving God who has made that for us and there’s a lot of benefits from that. I bring them both up because while they’re both great, I believe for everyone to have participated in, there are two easy ways to get into this form of analog adventure. You do not have to sports specialize. By that, I mean you don’t have to pick a sport at the age of five or six and say, this is the one we’re going to go to college with. In fact, there is a growing body of evidence of the problems with that.
It makes you good, but it doesn’t give you the love of the sport necessarily. In fact, it can burn you out on the sport pretty hard. So we are talking about let’s go out and play sports and let’s actually just dive right into this first part, sports, the benefits of doing sports. I am incredibly biased on this and I’ll share why in a little bit, but I am biased for sports. I like them. I believe they’re valuable both as a participant and as a coach, as a teacher and the impact they’ve had in my life. Love sports. Few reasons. One, sports are great because they’re hard. That’s a benefit. I’ll come back to these, but I want to run through a few, oh no, I’m not actually, I’m going to start right now. They’re hard.
I grew up in a house where I had lots of things provided for me. I had loving parents and healthy siblings and we had lives where we got to play the sports we want and go to a great school. That’s wonderful. But at the end of the day, I didn’t really learn about my limits through that process, I learned about my limits from sports. I learned when I played football what it’s like to feel pain and the difference between having something hurt and being hurt. That’s an important discerning fact to be able to say as an adult, there’s a difference between being in pain and being hurt and that’s important to be able to break down. It’s difficult because you can find your physical limits for training, your physical limits of emotional, physical, and I would say spiritual health. As you get more fatigued, as a season drags on, as difficult situations arise, you need to figure out where are your limits and how do you push through rather than just ignoring it. Simply as part of being a human in a world that involves some suffering, it’s simulated suffering.
It is difficult, but it’s safe difficult, again, done well. Have we been exposed to situations with bad coaches and bad environments and unhealthy competitive natures? Absolutely. I’m not saying sports are perfect or that sports will save or fix your kid. I’m saying, done right, sports can be awesome because they’re hard. Now, if you work on a farm before school and then go to school and then come back and that’s your weekends as well, you probably don’t need sports to learn what life looks like when it’s hard. But a lot of us aren’t raised on farms. Again, I had a pretty cushy life growing up, and so wrestling and football and other athletic endeavors were how I trained my mind and my body. Now that I’m an adult, turns out training is still a really important part for me. I don’t wrestle anymore because I don’t want to break my hip, but I still have athletic endeavors that I love to train and process for. Not because it’s easy but because it’s hard.
And as I have pointed out previously, Anna showed to me one day a Calvin and Hobbes where the dad goes on a bike ride and it’s this crazy experience of traffic and rain and all sorts of acts of nature and broken tires, and he gets home and he’s like, the real trick to loving your job is to have a hobby that’s worse. And there is something for that I can say as in an avid cyclist, I don’t know that I can say avid, some of you listening to this are probably God’s gift to the sport. So just know that I like cycling like an avid cyclist. I found that’s probably an overstatement for what I actually am, but I do love cycling for that very reason. It’s hard and why young people can learn how to appreciate the difficulty along with the benefits of a sport.
The second is you get to practice a skill. Skills are all learned, but in school sometimes it feels like we’re just in this progression and so this is second grade math or this is fourth grade reading and we’re just kind of going through this procedure to get to an end that we assume we’ll just show up when we get there. But in sports, you get to watch that happen in real time. You don’t know how to throw a ball, and then you practice and now you know how to throw a ball or how to throw a ball better. We worked on how to flick the wrist on a pitch this last week, how you follow through with the fingers, that’s not just a shoulder elbow movement, that it actually follows through your arm. That’s a skill that I didn’t even know until smart people told me to teach my son that.
That’s awesome. So I love that part of sports. As a wrestling coach, I got to watch young people show up and this can be sensitive. If you’re a former wrestler and traumatized from it, I do apologize. Parents, don’t make your child wrestle. Offer it to them as an opportunity. Encourage them to go into it. But it’s really hard. They break all social norms including staying out of people’s bubbles. All of a sudden they’ve got someone in their bubble and they don’t know what to do. Because since kindergarten we’ve told them to keep their hands off people and all of a sudden you’re like, get in there Johnny. Rip his face off. So if you put your kid in wrestling, please just know there’s going to be some conversations you need to have about appropriate levels of violence because they’ve been trained to not do these things.
And what I loved is watching those kids show up, being completely overwhelmed for the first two, three days of practice and then slowly begin to pick up technique, pick up moves, and all of a sudden, by the end… So in our league, the way it worked in middle school was you would wrestle through, usually wrestling six or seven other teams and then there’d be a tournament at the end where all seven or eight teams would show up and you’d all start scratch. Basically you have your ranking from the season, but you’d go in and we’d have kids who lost all their matches, knock off a number one first round because they’ve learned and they’ve grown and then they all of a sudden have this confidence or they lose against that number one, and then they’d wrestle on to take third. And those third place kids in tournaments are the toughest because they have to wrestle two, three more matches than there are other people, depending if they had to wrestle in like a pigtail match to get into the actual tournament.
You get these kids that they’re tough, man. If it ends up being tie like three-three in overtime and you’re starting on your feet, I know which one of these kids is going to win. That crazy little meat eater that just realized that he’s got this incredible engine and motivation to be able to be competitive. It’s more than being a good wrestler though. Being a good athlete doesn’t make you a good person. I think we can all agree on that. Now, both in professional and amateur sports, that’s not the correlation I’m trying to make. I’m saying we’ve been given bodies that are designed by God to be able to do hard work and there’s an amount of that hard work that is good for us. It actually helps us be fruitful and healthful in other areas of our lives. It helps us deal with unhealthy things like anxiety and stress.
That’s awesome. Do hard things and practicing a skill and seeing that improvement can be so validating for a young person who might not believe that they have skills in some other areas or might not even believe they’re capable of the sport, helping them see now this is like what God made your body to do. Give it a shot. It doesn’t mean you’re going to be awesome at it. It simply means you can improve at a skill with deliberate effort and repetition. And that’s really, really cool to see.
Muscle motor nerve function just as growing young people, help them get that proprioception of being able to move their body, being able to do a jumping jack because your hands and feet are moving at the same time, that kind of stuff. But sports makes it fun. So you’re not just doing an athletic regime, which as adults we can force ourselves to do some hard things. But as young people, I mean playing tag and dodgeball are ways to learn how to do hard things in your physical limits and some of this muscle nerve motor skill connections and do it while playing a game. But guess what? It’s really just a sport and you’re still working hard. Ha ha, you’ve been tricked. So whatever that might be, being part of a team…
This is a positive one and a negative one, part of a team. You’re part of a team and now you have a common goal and that’s super cool. Even if it’s wrestling and you’re wrestling one match, but you’re still the team in the wrestling room and the wrestling room environment determines some of what’s going to happen out there on the mat. You still get points as a team. So this might be swimming or… I’m trying to think of another sport that you play independently but score together, anyway, bear with me. Gymnastics another example. Independent sport, you’re competing by yourself, but you’re competing with your team and for your team, those are great opportunities to just build friendships and comradery through adversity. These don’t have to be your best friends ever, but these can be people you now have a shared experience with.
And on the flip side, the negative side that’s still a positive is you don’t always get to pick your teams. Sometimes you do and you go to that one select team and if you don’t like someone, you switch. But a lot of life, a team is kind of a microcosm of society. You’re going to live next to people that you don’t necessarily cherish and love. You’re going to work with people that aren’t your number one pick and yet they’re still a good God and you’re still called to do your best, working as for the Lord and not for men. You’re going to have coaches and bosses that just aren’t excellent people, but guess what? That doesn’t mean they’ll never come to know the Lord. It just means right now they don’t.
I’ve had this happen where the single surliest coach I ever had in my life, he was a baseball coach growing up. Literally I was so bad at baseball, he skipped me in one of the playoff games, in the batting order and we got called on it for cheating. I actually didn’t pick up on it, I found out later. But he just wanted to win at all costs, even it meant skipping the bad kid, this guy. But come to find out later talking with his son when we’re in our 20s, he came to meet Jesus and he is so gentle and kind and humble and repentant for being a surly, salty, angry man. And that’s incredible. So that’s a little microcosm of the greater reality we live in and that can be really positive.
Can there be unsafe and unhealthy adults around our kids? There can be. Can there be kids that are toxic and the environment of the sport you’re playing or the competitive nature goes beyond sport and become something ugly and nasty? Yeah, sure, I’m going to leave that to your parenting, but keep in mind, at least in my experience as a coach in the area that I live in and in my experience as an athlete, by and large, even the negative experiences have helped prepare me for the times when guess what? The work world, not everyone’s there to help others because they love Jesus. Some people are there because evil, wicked people trying to do evil wicked things and being able to see that in a little time where it’s just two hours, four days a week or five days a week or whatever, that can at least begin to help me process what do I do with mean people and wicked people, people that celebrate bad things, how do we handle this?
So just know that even if you have to quit the sport, you at least get to have the conversation with your kid. Here’s why we’re stopping because this isn’t okay, and now you’ve seen it. Here’s what we do in response to that, we report it, we get them help, we go a different direction, we intercede and intervene. We support those who can’t support themselves, whatever the case might be, you get an opportunity to model Christ in that. And so I do like that for sports. And finally there is this idea of dealing with winning and dealing with losing. I’ll come back to wrestling because I like wrestling. Wrestling is awesome because there’s two of you in a ring effectively in some kind of unitard. It’s like we’re doing ballet, but it’s sweaty and violent. And now we are going to exert wills, and whoever wins won against the will of their opponent, meaning the person who loses never wanted to lose, they might get so tired, they’re willing to lose, they might get stuck and have to lose, but they didn’t show up in order to lose.
They would’ve just said, I forfeit. Hey look, I lost. If that’s your goal, you never had to put any effort. You tried and you lost. And that’s really, really hard to deal with in a public space. And that’s so important because it doesn’t define you. You are not a loser because you lost. You lost. And that’s a real thing. There’s very, very few athletes who have never lost. People go on really good streaks, but even Jordan Burroughs, one of America’s best ever wrestlers ended up losing in the Olympics. Now he won a couple golds and a couple world championships, but guess what? He lost before that and he lost after that. So helping our children recognize that this is something that happens when you try, when you grow, you’re going to lose. Great. And then when you win, you’re not somehow God’s gift to the sport just because you won. You won because God gifted you a body that can win and a mind that can win and a work ethic that works so hard that you can win.
And at the end of the day, the winning again doesn’t define you, it describes you. You won, good for you. Now what are you going to do with that winning? How do you give glory to God in that? How do you support those around you to make them better and make your team and your sport and your community stronger because of your winning, which can be awesome, right? I enjoy watching professional sports and amateur and it’s fun when my local team wins, but we need to make sure we don’t go so far as to find our identity in the winning. That’s what I really, really enjoy. I’ll add empathy to that. I did have a local football game I went to recently and our team, the team I was rooting for ended up just shellacking the other team. It was like 60 to six or something. I mean just a beat down.
At the football game, I cheered for the first four touchdowns, maybe five. And then it quickly became so lopsided that I was like, oh, you know what? I identify more with the other team because my experience in high school sports was going like three and 14 or whatever in high school for high school football victories. That’s more of what I can relate with. And so I was watching the other team be like, man, it’s so hard at half when you’re down by 30 and you’re like, we’re doing our best. We have three subs. We’re not as good as this team to start with and it’s going to be a really long second half of football. We’re not quitting. I love that. That was awesome.
But we’re frustrated and we’re tired and we are not enjoying this sport. And I think there is something to that idea of being able to do something really, really hard and stick at it because you said, yes, I’m going to play this game. And so you play it even though you lose, even though it’s inconvenient, even though it looks bad and it’s going to show up on social media. Those things do matter even though it’s rough. And I really felt for that other team. So all right, that’s sports.
I want to take a quick aside before we move on, thinking about sports and okay, but what about eSports? I would simply challenge you. Really the only correlation between sports and eSports is the fact that they’re competitive. If you don’t believe me, watch one round of Fortnite and then watch one game of baseball, and just tell me which one feels more overwhelming to you. It’s kind of like if you go and watch on YouTube a clip of Powderpuff Girls, Powerpuff Girls, Powderpuff is the football, Powerpuff Girls and Mr. Rogers, they’re both TV shows. That’s about all the similarities. They both have characters I guess. But when we talk about the amount of stimulation and the amount of engagement, the amount of just overwhelming input that occurs, eSports are competitive and they do take practice, but the secondary skills you gain and the parts of your body and character that are tested through eSports are not the same as a physical sport that takes a physical emotional toll on you in the way of physical exercise and physical exertion.
eSports will take skill. They still take practice. I’m very impressed by people that are good at them, but they’re not to be conflated for their positive outputs. So keep that in mind because eSports are here and they’re a thing and you can go pro in them and I get all that, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about sports that happen at the pace of your life. Kinds of sports, we can go with school sports, you can go with club sports and you can go kind of independent sports. So the sports that everyone “plays” in your area, that’s just a school sport. Your school might have it. We’re talking field hockey or hockey for my East Coast friends, soccer, baseball, football, volleyball, wrestling, any of those sports that are just kind of the collegiate prep sports, awesome. Tennis, things like that.
You can go into club sports which might mimic those school sports or they might add some variation. So you might get into lacrosse. In my area, we don’t have it for the schools in my area. I know, again, East Coast you’ve got a lot of lacrosse, you have crew and things like that, but those are club sports out here, where you got to go… Still competitive, but you have to go to a special league with a special group and you might be playing with actual people from schools you’d normally compete against and you’re all in a team because of your area. Anything from mountain biking, cycling, bowling, these are all sports that you can play in club versions. Then you have the independent version and these are the ones that are kind of outside the box. You’re rock climbing, disc golf, which is a thing, I don’t know if that’s a thing everywhere, but literally you play golf with specialized Frisbees.
While we’re on the subject of Frisbees, you can also do ultimate Frisbee, skiing, power lifting, chess, dodgeball, things like that are sports that maybe they’re an intramural style where you’re playing within your school or in between schools, but not in a competitive league. But this idea that you’re still doing something competitive, you’re still doing something active. Kind of the example of, well, I said all this, archery, shooting trap, that’d actually be a club [inaudible 00:19:57] around here, where you’re in some of the rifle or shotgun sports or even just pistol and shooting sports in general. So those are the kinds of things we’re talking about.
The idea here being really three points. First that life is hard and this is going to be teaching you that. An example would be life is hard. So in my life, that was how I kind of broke out of my very… How to say that? Now I didn’t break out, I guess. Let me correct that. Life is hard and sports can prep you for that. I’ll just leave it at that. And I mentioned in my life they played a valuable role for showing me just how far I can go, how far I can push myself. And I found further limits as I’ve grown older. But it at least let me know that, oh, you know what? I’m capable of more than I thought when I showed up at this practice or when I showed up for this sport. I understand what it’s like and the next time I experience that level of effort, it doesn’t feel as hard because I’ve done it before.
The second would be building friendships. In my personal life, I’ve had the blessing of being on some teams with some great people and from childhood till now, I’m still friends with probably a half dozen. I can call them up, text them regularly, but there’s dozens of people that are just adults in my community. We might’ve played on a baseball team in little league like that team where I got pulled in one of the late innings. There’s a couple of adults in my community, they run local businesses, they go to local churches and we just bump into each other in community. And it’s that common touch of like, oh, hey, we were on a sports team once, or I played against their sports team in lost in those same playoffs. And there’s another half dozen people in that specific sport, but dozens when you go through elementary and middle and high school sports. And that is valuable for living in the same area and for getting to know the people around you or moving to a new area and getting to know people quickly. Sports can be great for that.
And then third and finally my incredible bias. I mentioned early on I would explain why I’m so biased for sports and the answer is because Ann and I met at a sports camp. We were at NBC Camps, Northwest Basketball Camps here in Washington State. It’s an amazing organization that brings gospel-centered truth and looks to glorify God through hard work and athletics, which is awesome. I was not a great basketball player, but they were shorthanded and they needed me. And lo and behold, Anna and I coached on the same week, which was awesome. So I’m super biased for sports camps, both because of the great people you meet and the great life lessons you learn. I hope that our children will have a chance to go to NBC. Owen might this coming summer, which would be amazing. But at the end of the day, I’m going to hold lightly the idea of him meeting his future mate at this camp.
The idea simply it has played a major part of Anna’s and my life. However, I would say that, our lives, and we firmly believe that that can be a positive thing even if you don’t mean to your spouse, that it’s a great way to spend your energy, to spend your effort into develop and grow while glorifying God. Another group around us is reality sports, who does an awesome job both training adults for just athletic endeavors they’re interested in, but also providing sports camps and opportunities for young people in wrestling and volleyball and soccer and football and raising up athletes who, as they say, compete upside down. That’s so important too, competing upside down being that we put God first and a character comes before the competition and competition is an extension of who God’s making us, which I love. So Brian Peterson and that team does awesome there. Look them up even if you’re not in the area, be impressed and ask someone to start something like that in your area because pretty incredible.
All right, so I nerded out pretty hard there on sports, but sports aren’t the only way to do it. There are absolutely times where you’re like, I just don’t care. I’m not that competitive or if I am competitive, I’m not good enough to be competitive. And there comes a point, especially in our area here in Washington State where you just all our junior highs merge into a single high school team. I mean, so you were playing on a 15 person team and now there’s 15 people total, but there were 45 kids who made the team last year and now the ninth grade team plays at the high school and only 15 are going to make it. So two thirds of the kids won’t make the cut. So what do you do? You can find a different sport. It’s going to be hard to pick up if you haven’t played before.
You can go independent, you can go kind of hobby, intermural sport or you can start finding things to do outside. And when we get outside, all I’m talking about here, you can have kids who are still in strollers just talking about making a habit, let’s make 10 to 15 minutes, go on a walk around your block, go on a walk in your neighborhood, go to a local park and just get outside. And really three things that I would say to do here, and I might’ve messed this up so I apologize if I did. The first is just get out 10 to 15 minutes. So let’s scale this for so local, in your backyard. Our kids had a Highlight magazine, which we’ve actually been really impressed with Highlight magazine. If you want something that has safe content that the kids love to get in the mail, we had grandparents buy it for them I think three or four years ago.
And now all three kids, they get the exact same edition, is that what you call it? The month’s edition. Anyway, they get the same monthly subscription. I was going to call it an episode, each time and they do the mazes and they do the coloring and they ask the questions and they read the silly stories and then they get these ideas and this time it was like playing outside ideas and one of them was to make a bug hotel. So they went out under the trampoline because we don’t mow there and it’s nice and filtered lights. So the grass gets really tall and they brought sticks and they brought little pieces of wood and they brought some firewood and they added leaves and grass and then they built these little buildings and they made a little town for bugs, which bugs don’t care, but it was a fun idea.
And then they go out and check on them and they count the number of bugs they’ve got in the area and they have a whole story going on with their little bug hotels. Super cool. 10 to 15 minutes, it gets you out in something. You cannot get overstimulated while counting bugs. It’s just not possible. You do get little bits of awe and wonder. You do get some noticing the details and that’s the second piece that we’ll talk about here in a moment. But in your backyard you can do something as simple as a bug hotel, a simple little thing you can do in any backyard. The second would be like in our town, in our town we have really cool sidewalks in the area that we live. So we go and walk the sidewalks, we can do that. They have planted oak trees and so this time of year the oak trees look like fireworks are going off.
We’ve got these… I mean hundreds of oak trees planted down the middle of the roads, down both sides of the roads, 30 feet tall, 40 feet tall, dropping acorns all over the place at this point. And it’s gorgeous and it’s amazing. So we walk the sidewalks, but so many areas have city parks, have designated areas for greenery and for quiet. And if your area’s taken over by encampments of individuals, I’m sorry, find one that’s safe. Don’t risk your life and limb on this, but finding an area where you can get in nature, even if it’s in the middle of a city. Those are powerful spots. And again, you can do it quick, you can plan it in route to a coffee shop or directly after a coffee shop, that still counts. Because you’re getting into that space where things happen at the pace of real life. In your area, find those local parks that might be a little bigger. So this might be a state park or even a national park.
So in our area, Mount Rainier is right in our neck of the woods. So we took the kids out there, go hike Paradise. If you’re in the area, please go to Paradise. Go to Ohanapecosh, which is a campground that we camped at this summer. There are so many hikes. You can use a traveling app to find great hikes. You can just use Google. They’re actually fun, especially here in Washington, finding great routes for you that are well rated and have views. We did this when we visited Leavenworth over towards Wenatchee and Eastern Washington. Just look up hikes in the area and they’ll have grade… All Trails is one of the apps that’s great, but even just through Google, you can find people’s pictures and ratings and they’ll explain like start here, park there. That stuff’s great.
So pro-tips, Google and All Trails are two options for you. And then when you go someplace, you want to go on a family trip. We’ve had the blessing of going down to Palm Desert every couple years in California and one of the kids’ favorite things to do is hike up to this cross that’s just on the side of the mountain and it’s red rock. It could not be more different than what we experience here. You have to do it before noon or you’re going to melt, but it’s beautiful and the kids love it. And yes, if you fall, the rocks are razor blades, but that doesn’t stop the kids from having a great time and from looking forward to the next chance they might get to do it. And that’s such a cool thing. Yeah, go do fun things and play those games, watch those shows, go to those fun locations and see if you can tie some nature in with wherever you go to experience what nature is like there.
We found out they have little, I think they’re considered cactus, little barb shooting plants in this part of California. We don’t have spring loaded death plants around here. That’s a new thing for us and that’s interesting. It’s exciting. And while it’s not fun to bump into one, it is fascinating that it happens and it sparks curiosity and questions and what other kind of plants are there. So when you’re talking about nature, the first one is get out in it. Even if it’s just 10, 15 minutes, maybe it’s a day hike, maybe it’s a full weekend or a week of camping, et cetera. That’s super cool. I’ve never been camping for a week, so I am not going to push you there. But I will tell you that I appreciate every time I get a chance to get out in nature and even if it’s a solo prayer walk or even if it’s just an evening walk with a family to recalibrate and bring down some of the anxiety and stress of the constant notifications and distractions and call and tug of technology.
Second, pay attention to the details. So the first is get outside. The second is when you’re in nature, get outside and pay attention to the details. This could be as simple as I mentioned as an acorn, where you get to pick it up and look at it and the kids pop the tops off and they like to make little characters out of them and spin them like tops, like little details. It could be a snail on your shopping cart. The idea is it’s something to break you out of the norm, of the pace and the tempo of getting to the next thing and the to-dos that you absolutely have that are important. But this is a chance to pause and remember this critter is here. This plant is here because of a God who designed it, because this thing is fearfully and wonderfully made much like you and I and that the heavens declare the glories of God that this is something that we can look at and be like, my goodness, that’s amazing.
Think about this. If we made a bunch of little autonomous robots, that could go and decompose, rotting food for us. That could go and pick up obnoxious critters for us and eat them. The birds and the bugs and the amount of work God designed and beauty God designed into nature is incredible and we can be reminded of that for as simple as staring at a leaf for a minute. So please take a moment to observe those details and spark some wonder. And finally take nature at the pace of nature. While it’s awesome to get outside and dirt bike and snowmobile and whatever, water ski, or whatever else you’re doing in nature, I’m specifically talking for this get in nature as a recalibration and an analog adventure piece that has to be self-powered. So I’m fine if you want to go mountain biking or ride your bicycle because there’s nothing like being self-powered on a walk, on a run, on a ride to gain some humility when we come up against nature like a headwind, a rainstorm, a slight incline, 2%, not much.
Oh my goodness, the calf burn that occurs, the way you’ll feel that in your quads and lungs is notable and you’re like, oh, I thought this road was flat. The number of times I’ve thought that out here in the northwest. I thought this road was flat. It’s not flat, it’s a 2% grade. It’s a false flat and it burns so bad. That’s a wonderful reminder of just how much we rely on technology, how blessed we are to have it, and of how difficult nature can be to survive in that. It is rough and that builds us a little bit of humility in the process and helps us create wonder. Remember the point of all of this is to have analog adventures, to have them at the pace of real life and to recalibrate ourselves for what life can look like or more importantly, to recalibrate ourselves to the wonder and the awe of nature and the God who created it.
And to get ourselves into a space where we can learn and grow at the pace of real life, where we don’t rely on outside stimulation of just the fact that it’s fast moving to be engaged, and we don’t rely on behavioral hooks to train us into believing we need this thing. Instead, we can work hard, we can grow, we can learn from both the good and the bad, and we can be engaged and amazed at the bodies God’s given us and at the nature he’s put around us. So hope you enjoyed it. Please share it with somebody. Feel free to reach out, [email protected] or @LoveGodUseTech on Instagram and Facebook and join us next week as we continue this conversation about how we can love God and use tech.
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