What if you could train your soul?
Thoughts on God while running = structure for spiritual fitness
When I was a child, I would go outside and talk with God.
God always talked back.
I never told anyone about this, because I never found it strange or unusual. I figured everyone talked with God - and heard his response.
In my senior year of college, I had a calling experience.
I was sitting in an empty chapel, while in the midst of a 5-day silent retreat, and I heard Jesus say the words:
‘Do this in remembrance of me’.
I knew I was called to be a priest (even though at the time I thought that was impossible because I was a 22-year old Roman Catholic girl!).
I’ve always felt God’s presence. I just know God is there, and I feel like he answers me when I pray and comforts me when I’m lost and afraid.
And now I know that not everyone has this experience!
As I’ve grown in my life and my ministry (and I became a priest after all!), I’ve frequently encountered people struggling with their faith. Those who are:
Not sure what to believe, or how to believe.
Those who would give anything to hear God’s voice.
People convinced that God doesn’t hear them, doesn’t answer prayers.
Sometimes they even fear that God doesn’t exist.
I’ve also met many people who do believe in God - and they belong to a church - but they long for something deeper.
My husband is one of them, in fact!
We met when he was on a church board and I was on the Bishop’s staff. This was a wonderful beginning of our love story, but it was also the end of my husband’s active involvement in church life.
He kept longing to know how to follow Jesus more closely in his life, and he kept getting offers to sit on committees.
Most congregations offered Sunday worship and an occasional Bible study, but nothing else that helped him know how to be a Christian. Where to learn more about the faith - and crucially, how to incorporate his beliefs into daily life.
Now he worships with me occasionally - and we pray every day, and actively follow a discernment process for seeking God’s will in our lives - but he has withdrawn from participating in a congregation.
Today in my ministry I spend a lot of time considering the current state of the church. I keep seeing the struggle to address these two basic spiritual needs:
How to seek God’s presence (or deeper presence) in our lives.
How to find a framework of Christian practice that guides us and gives us purpose and meaning.
I started to believe that my own experiences of faith and Christian belief could help me develop ways to share wisdom about relationship with God.
But I couldn’t quite grasp the framework.
Today’s congregational life doesn’t feel set up to support ongoing spiritual growth - for the individual or the community.
It felt like there needed to be something beyond committees, outreach, and ‘adult forum’ for guiding the faithful into discipleship.
I serve with an extraordinary congregation, where they have naturally grown into deep Christian practice - especially hospitality, prayer, and worship - and where their hunger to grow further in faith has supported and inspired me to try and build something with them.
Then I realized there was one more aspect of my own life that provides the type of structure I was thinking about: running.
I’ve been a runner for over 40 years.
I know a lot about workouts and training schedules for races. I’ve modified various aspects of my life, trying to align them for my best performance: strength work, speed work, stretching, endurance. Not to mention how I eat, sleep, manage my stress and schedule my time - so I have enough time to prepare to run, run and recover from running!
Over the course of decades, the sport of running has provided a rhythm for my body - and also my soul.
Running - and everything that goes with it - has helped me regularly engage in a set of practices that don’t just keep me physically fit, they also keep me oriented towards peace, contentment, and joy.
Running has provided a deep community - in some ways as deep as the community I share with my church.
I spend as much time with my running friends - we call each other ‘family’ - as I do with almost anyone else outside my immediate family.
We run together - we also travel to races with each other, and gather for celebrations and casual social events. We show up for each other - for weddings and funerals, for emotional and spiritual support, for inside jokes and coffee together when the weekly long run is complete.
There’s something about spending that time - miles and miles, year after year - literally going through the motions, that bonds us to one another. And changes us over time.
I began to see a structure for spiritual formation similar to my running practice, that provides the same kind of sustained activity that provides a whole-life transformation.
I was on a run when I started to get an inkling that I might try to draw all these seemingly random aspects of my life and ministry together:
How to deepen our relationship with God - individually and in community - through a set of faith practices.
Then came the final question to wrestle with: what should the ‘practice’ be?
With running, there’s a basic canon of what’s necessary to support optimal physical condition: stretching, strength, endurance training, and teamwork.
How would I figure out a similar set of practices for the soul?
Being a Christian - following Jesus - can feel complex, even contradictory these days.
What a Christian believes can vary widely - politically and theologically.
There are so many different types of Christianity - dozens of denominations, plus non-denominational churches - all varying widely in terms of how they ‘do’ church and what they believe..
Trying to stick strictly to the Bible provides similar conundrums - which version of the Bible? Old Testament and New Testament? Should we take it literally or interpret through a certain lens?
Personally, I am a clergy person in the Episcopal Church (and was raised Roman Catholic), so I have my own church ‘niche’ and theological viewpoint.
Yet I also feel compelled to find a deep, universal understanding of the bedrock of Christian faith and practice. Something on which many different expressions have been built over the centuries.
What if there was a way to find the structure I was seeking that both grounds and transcends all the different ways of following Jesus?
I let all this tumble around in my heart while I ran - and prayed - morning after morning. And the answer finally came to me: another of those moments where I heard God’s voice.
‘Learn from the earliest church.’
I’ve always been drawn to the Acts of the Apostles in the Bible - how those first followers carried on after Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. How they were first called ‘Christians’ - and how they formed the church together: praying and singing, worshiping and giving testimony, reading Scripture and healing in Jesus’ name.
I have also been deeply formed by ancient church history - the first few hundred years of how Christians figured out what it meant to be the church.
To still follow Jesus even when he wasn’t there with them in the flesh.
I was particularly influenced by the Didache (DEE-dah-kay), one of the earliest Christian texts, dating from the first or second century, and the Apostolic Tradition, attributed to Hippolytus, but most likely a collection of texts from the second and third centuries.
This was the final puzzle piece for me. Combining these three sources - Acts, the Didache, and the Apostolic Tradition - I could learn the structure of Christian life from those who created it.
And I could translate that framework into a set of exercises to help guide today’s Christians into deeper relationship with God.
This is how Trexo was born.
Trexo - pronounced ‘TRAY-co’, and transliterated into the Greek for ‘run’, is a gym for your soul.
It’s a set of exercises - often repetitive - that gradually increases our spiritual strength and flexibility. This is the soul work - how to deepen our relationship with God.
It’s the Way of Life - The practices of those who established the first Christian communities. This is the structure - how the earliest followers of Jesus found their lives transformed.
Trexo is not primarily intellectual. It’s not Bible study, it’s not learning about the faith - though Scripture is definitely part of it.
It’s experiential - words and movements and actions to take part in. It’s stretching and strengthening our spiritual core.
Using prayer and worship as our basic exercises, we’ll grow in the practice of the Christian faith.
This is not about what kind of Christian you are, or what your theology is.
Trexo exercises are designed to be used by individuals - anyone interested in learning more - or by congregations together, or to form and establish new kinds of faith communities.
Trexo is:
Discovering a life with God at its center
The bedrock of unconditional love.
Practicing like the earliest Christians did
To stretch and strengthen our capacity for life.
Connecting with others through faith
Find more peace, perspective, and JOY.
Join the gym for your soul for the way of life. Hearts up!
I have been seeking wisdom from ancient traditions to guide working with different cultures on the mission field. So I am interested to see what you have found.