Wesleyan Grace

For over six months, my pedometer and I have been joined at the hip.

It’s part of my health insurance plan’s secret plot to get me fit and healthy now instead of paying big bucks down the road to address cardiovascular and weight-related problems. (Either that, or they just want me hit by a car and out of their hair before I need major medical work!)

Anyway, the crazy thing works. I get “Healthmiles” points for every day I walk over 7000 steps (about 3-1/2 miles).

For the first month and a half of my wearing the pedometer, I didn’t change my sedentary habits. I think that during those days, I got points for a 7000-step day once! Then, I started walking to the church. I live ten blocks away, and I had been driving to work every day. My mileage increased. At the beginning of Lent, I decided that for the season, I would walk anywhere I didn’t HAVE TO drive. That included walking to Tacoma Community House, St. Joe’s Hospital, Tacoma General, First UMC … and it even included, one lovely spring day, a pastoral call at Helen Engle’s south of Fircrest, and another day, a visit to Dave Pflueger’s on North Pearl. When Lent was over, I decided that the pattern should continue.

I found a five-mile loop for recreational walks, involving the McCarver/Carr hill down to Old Town, a walk along Ruston Way, and a lovely climb through the woods of Puget Park to north 31st & Proctor, then home. TWO good coffee stops along the way, if I’m wanting to be leisurely.

As my miles have gone up, my weight has been slowly coming down — I’ve lost a fifteen pounds without changing my diet.

My goal is to walk 7000 steps every day of the week, and to make 12,000 steps (about 6 miles) on at least five of those days. If I walk from home to Shakabrah for coffee in the morning, then from home to church twice, I’m almost there, and that doesn’t even feel incovenient.

I’ve taken three adventure-scale walks over the months:

• One lovely morning I started walking way early, got down onto Ruston Way and just kept going, to Point Defiance, then the park’s Outer Perimeter Trail, which basically follows the Five Mile Drive. Walking home got tiring, I’ll admit. But the walk was fifteen or sixteen miles, and the day was over eighteen.
• Saturday before Annual Conference, I walked the loop of all the churches in the Tacoma Connecting Mission: Epworth LeSourd, First, Grace, Kalevaria, St. Paul’s, Bethany, Fern Hill, Asbury, Sixth Avenue, and back to Epworth LeSourd. 21 or so miles. I took pictures along the way, and forwarded them to FaceBook and Flickr, until the battery in my Blackberry died.
• A couple weeks ago, on a cool and somewhat damp morning, I walked the Scott Pierson Trail, a hike/bike trail that parallels Highway 16 all the way from S. Trafton to the Narrows Bridge. Then across the bridge, and back, and home. 12.5 miles. I’ve been from home to the other side of the bridge & back again since that day. Walkers on most of our sidewalks & trails greet each other with a polite nod, usually. Walkers on the bridge greet each other with a huge grin that says, “Isn’t this just the greatest?”

The big walks aren’t where I get my joy in walking, though. The joy comes in walking the places I used to depend on driving: to & from church, to the hospital or a meeting, and so forth.

The joy comes in noticing what I used to whiz by at 35 mph, cocooned in my car. I pick up the scent of a plant, and learn what plant it is. I notice the cool and breeze a shade tree creates on a sunny midday. I hear the wind chimes gently playing at someone’s house, and the anonymous house becomes for me, someone’s home. I smell dinners cooking — barbecue, garlic & peppers,  fish, curry, and am thankful for the diversity of the neighborhoods in which we live.

And the joy comes especially in the human-to-human interactions that the car prevents. Walking to work a couple weeks ago, then to a meeting at First UMC, I walked something like 2-1/2 miles. In that distance, I talked with ten people, called four or five by name, made the day ten people better for me, and one person better for each of ten others. I believe small interactions make the world better.

Extra gifts:

• greeting people I know, far from home;
• being greeted by people who recognize me;
• a chance conversation turning into a moment of pastoral care, building relationship and sharing Christ’s love;
• hearing music, following the sound, and discovering a noontime concert I hadn’t expected;
• creative thinking. It shouldn’t be surprising to me how often an idea comes to me somewhere out there on the sidewalks of Tacoma.
• saving money! I’ve walked close to a thousand miles since January; probably half of those are miles I would have driven in the old days. Those short-distance drives I’m no longer doing are the worst for gas mileage. So I’ve probably saved three tanks of gas, or more — and the miles-per-gallon my car is now giving me has gone up into the thirties.

So I walk. And as long as it’s fruitful, I’ll continue.