The Life of the Body
The Firestone Files: Letters to My Grandchildren — Dr. Chris L. Firestone
October 20, 2025 · Episode 9 · 51:47
https://drchrisfirestone.com/episode/the-life-of-the-body/

Transcript is auto-generated from YouTube captions and lightly formatted; it may contain errors.

Hey everybody, welcome again to the Firestone Files. I am Dr. Chris Firestone and today I will be dealing with the question, how important are sports and physical fitness to proper human development? Hey everybody, welcome to the Firestone Files. I am Dr. Chris Firestone. Today I'm going to be bringing you a previously scheduled broadcast or podcast here called The Life of the Body. This will finish this miniseries, the life of the mind and life of the heart and life of the body. I'm sure we're going to return to these topics. They're integrated throughout the Firestone Files, but I wanted to dedicate a few stories and a few ideas in each of these areas just to show how important they really are.

Uh, as I mentioned, this is regularly scheduled broadcasting at this point or podcasting, but uh, we're not going to be doing business as usual going forward. I'm looking forward to putting together a special event for you, the Guinness Book of World Record Attempt by, uh, Monster Michael Todd. He's a Christian strongman is going to be arm wrestling a whole lot of people in January in Hot Springs, Arkansas. If that event interests you, um maybe you can plan to visit us during that time.

It's going to be a a fabulous uh weekend endeavor there. Uh but you know, we'll be doing some other broadcasts along the way to prepare for that and then um probably interjecting with some other special topics here in the middle. So I'm, as I mentioned, since the death of Charlie Carrick, we're not going to do business as usual, but I do have these offerings for you here. And this one being the life of the body. So excited to be able to to present that to you. And uh yeah, that's what we have coming at you today on the Firestone Files. Well, we will discuss the life of the body as a third installment of our life series.

You guys, if you've been keeping up with what we've been talking about, we discussed in the first episode in this particular series, the life of the mind. I suppose as a philosopher, that was something I was obligated to do. Uh we discuss the importance of being intellectually present and participatory in the various life situations that confront us. Some of them are mundane and uh you know almost accidental and others we put ourselves in situations and then we have to react or confront situations as they come up in real time.

And I made the argument I guess that the thoughtful life is not arbitrary. is not just going through the motions but requires us to think critically and creatively about life's situations, opportunities and challenges and just being aware of who you are and your place in the world and being ready intellectually as it were to interact with life. In the uh subsequent or the next episode I talked about the life of the heart and about the primacy of practical moral or ethical living. I mentioned my favorite philosopher Emanuel Kant. He argued for the primacy of practical reason because at the end of the day that's where the rubber meets the road and you're not a act passive participant in life.

You're an active participant and you're either going to be sort of weward or you're going to be pursuing the good and a moral life kind of standing in the river of life and uh using the moral law and uh human freedom to become what you were meant to be.

And uh you know we're living you know that's tempered by the recognition that we're living in an already not yet world where um you know we we're called to celebrate sort of puress I think um um moral living uh goodness and the pursuit of goodness and yet the world is callous and cold and Um you know there's evil present and situations abound where it is required of us that we be thoughtful uh about how we live well or live good in the world.

So we talked a little bit about Jesus's admonition to his disciples in Matthew chap 10 in particular verse 16 where he talks about you know being wise as uh serpents and gentle as doves and the importance of what I would call call wise purity. Um it dawned on me after that podcast that the ancients called this sort of approach and this is why um western thought and Christian thought have so many affinities and why I think the gospel spread westward uh so rapidly because they were already kind of familiar with this way of thinking and living in the world. Um uh the ancients used the word charity to describe this virtue. It deemed it to be among the highest of all the virtues.

Think of it as wise mercy, grace and helps. I think they call it a cardinal virtue. So today we turn our sights to the role of the body and this tripartite understanding of the human person. How important is maintaining a trained body along life's way? Well, I've already gotten a little bit into the philosophy, but I'd like to do a little bit of a deeper dive before I few tell a few stories of my own physical journey, you might say, in this world. Um, human anthropology can be approached in a variety of ways.

Plato for example thought that the human being was principally an immutable soul the soul was somehow birthed into this world and forgot the world from which it came and the goal of life for Plato is to educate the soul. So this is why he first establishes the academy. And I use we still use that word academy even today because of Plato's belief that educating a person meant helping the soul to remember the universal realm of forms and it helps us to migrate and ready ourselves for death and migrate back to the ultimate reality that is the universal realm of forms. So the body in such a view, such a platonic view, if you will, is merely the corruptible or mutable appearance of the immutable soul. In a sense, it is a disposable or at least um something to be overcome element of the human person. It's real, but it's really just a shadow of our ultimate reality.

And uh I mean this this way of thinking both celebrates the immaterial, the eternal and education as a means for getting to the eternal, but it also downplays the significance of the body. And so Plato was uh you know a a welcome interface with Christianity on one level but also challenged Christianity and its insistence on the importance of the body. Now, Aristotle his uh his pupil and uh I guess disciple you know he starts lys the lysum the uh sort of alternative academy and he had a more what I would call body friendly view of anthropology. For him humans are rational animals.

You do not even have a legitimate human being without a body because form without matter is empty and matter without form is blind. And so for Aristotle, form and matter or what you might say in in the case of the human being, the soul in the body make something substantial, make it real. And the only question that remains for human beings is whether this rational animal that I am is realizing its purpose in the grand scheme of things. And so Aristotle had a fascinating anthropology and and and uh one that was um perhaps even a little more friendly if you will to Christian thought. Now the Bible speaks of the human person.

Now, you know, I've read um various places within the Bible and it sometimes suggests two aspects of the human being. Sometimes the Bible expresses three aspects to the human being. Sometimes it expresses four aspects to the human being. Might even express more than that. Um and that can be confusing to people if you're looking at it with the kind of scientific eyes that uh you know the ancients might have had or contemporaries even more so when we read the Bible we see oh wow there's there's at least three anthropologies in scripture. Notice however that the emphasis is not on the body per se but on various aspects of the human person that are not material.

So those additional elements. So one of the views in the Bible that we see is flesh and spirit and that would get sort of a you know um two elements to the human person be suggestive of that. Um another one of them is a mind body and spirit. We see that one in scripture. Sometimes we even see in scripture mind body soul and spirit. But the thing to notice here is that the scriptures are giving us various perspectives if you will on the immaterial elements of the human person and they are robust and there's different ways of thinking about the immaterial elements of the human person.

So I don't think the Bible is contradicting itself. I think that the various authors within the Bible are and are sharing with us different ways of conceptualizing that immaterial self. It is mental and instrumental in in in in some ways. It is uh an enduring soul that will in effect get a new body in um in the uh in the afterlife and it is spiritual. It has a relationship with God that it must tend to. And these different aspects of the immaterial self are, I think, what the scriptures are trying to teach us. It warns us not to be afraid of people who can kill the body, but be afraid of those who are after your soul, that immaterial element.

Don't lose that in the process. they can kill the body um without really harming as it were your eternal relationship and prospects with God. Interestingly, however, the Bible does not divorce the soul or immaterial elements of the body uh from the body. Rather, it goes out of its way to demonstrate the eventual resurrection of the body. I mean, that's basically the the very core of the New Testament. Um, that, you know, Paul even says this in in 1 Corinthians 15 that if the resurrection doesn't didn't happen, if he isn't the first born born among the dead, then our faith is in vain and we're to be pied more than any other theorizer about the human condition.

He doesn't say it exactly that way. That's the way a philosopher kind of might put it. Um, it goes out of its way, the Bible does, to demonstrate the eventual resurrection of the body into an imperishable state that participates in judgment and in eternity. In other words, God will not be thwarted in his creation and recreation of human beings. You can think of those as two different things, but really they're just one thing. God creating human beings with the intention that they would freely freely choose to love him. Um and so the body into which God first breathed life will be with us forever. This imper this perishable one won't be but something enduring will be.

For now, we're expected to be good stewards of the one that we've been given. Now, if you fast forward out of the ancients um to the enlightenment, um we brought a renewed approach and renewed interest in human anthropology. The empiricists from the enlightenment are basically arguing that our minds are an epiphenomena of the body or what you might say matter in motion. Somehow the spirit and the mind are uh emergent properties if you will out of the physical realities.

Um that's an interesting claim. Some of the empiricists like John Lock for example want to suggest that that's you know there's a fundamental reality to the human person that undergirds all of this that is mental and is in fact physical. The rationalists are a lot more explicit about this like deart and linenets and eventually Kant. They hold that uh you know like Deart would hold that we're ghosts in the machine of the body. We have rational natures and we have bodily natures. How they interact is indeterminable.

We can talk about it, we can reason it, we can um you know study the mind body problem and it's a real problem in a sense that we don't know exactly how they relate to each other but in fact they do relate to each other and that remains one of those open questions in philosophy. a lot of money, a lot of research is being poured into those areas. Uh, and still we don't have a good grasp of how that works or why it works even. Uh, but we know that it does. It would not be a stretch to say that the rationalists are the epistemic analog of Plato and the empiricists are the epistemic analog of Aristotle.

I mean that's sometimes the way it's put in philosophy that once ontology was marginalized as first philosophy and and and epistemology became first philosophy in the enlightenment period it basically broke down into sort of uh uh empirical/ristatilian uh modes of thinking and platonic um or um or rationalist ways of thinking. I think that that's a little bit too simplistic as it stands, but it is a good analog, I think, for trying to understand how these things migrated into the modern period.

Aristotle held to the reality of form and Plato definitely held to the reality of the body. Even if in both of these cases the realism was pretty thin on these matters and the metaphysics of them is complicated, um we still I think see a difference between Plato and Aristotle and these emergent um epistemologies of rationalism and empiricism. So in talking about uh the life of the mind, the life of the heart and the life of the body, I'm implicitly siding with the western conrle of the human being that blends the biblical and the sort of Greco Roman understandings of the human person. The life of the body is integrated with the other two but can be singled out in its own right.

We ought to be profound um you know uh stewards of the body. Um and so physical training and competition are going to be important contributors to human well-being even if that competition is merely thought of as competition with oneself. So that's where I want to leave the philosophy for now. I want to talk about a few stories of my own upbringing and maybe some related to my kids that I think can help flesh out, no pun intended, uh the life of the body. Um so if I think back to my own sports career when I was younger and when I was uh you know in grade school was primarily swimming.

I went to Emanuel Lutheran grade school on the south side of Chicago and um they would take us swimming and I was a I thought pretty good swimmer. Uh I was an all African-American school that I went to and uh that might have that might have given me uh you know a higher view of my swimming uh skills than I otherwise would have had. But anyway, that's a side point. No, maybe a little bit contentious, but I'll leave it at that.

Um but I migrated from swimming into baseball and once I hit baseball you know in um I effectively it was like second third fourth grades and I I kind of moved out of swimming as you know swimming was merely a pastime not a competition for me. Baseball took over my life. I there were times I played baseball from grade school all the way through high school. Um and there were times where I had visions of being Ted Williams. Um, you know, Hank Aaron, I was from that era that still remembered these great players uh from the ' 50s, '60s, and 70s.

And, uh, you know, I I I uh I traded baseball cards and, uh, collected them and really had visions of going into that world for quite a long time. Um, when baseball began to wind down for me, there are variety of reasons for that. Uh, one of the reasons it wound down for me is I found baseball to be one of the most political sports that I that I ever played. In other words, in order to get playing time and in order to get positioned well, in order to make the all-star team and so forth, you had to know the coach and uh you had to be related to the coach and all of that.

I could tell stories, I probably will tell stories down the line about my baseball career and why the politics of it soured it for me so much. Um, in high school, I I kind of I played uh some um American Legion ball, but I didn't play for the high school. I actually took on football and track initially, played football for a couple of years through my sophomore year and found that to be invigorating and challenging. And man, when you get hit and you have to get back up, man, there's no better metaphor in life um than a good football game. Um about halfway through my high school career, I decided to drop out of track in football and join the chess club.

And I'm not going to say that that's a sport. It did require some physical prowess because you sometimes had to sit for 12 straight hours when you're playing a tournament, stuff like that. But it's not really a sport. When I started playing chess, I migrated it out of track and field and football and into basketball. Basketball was something I could pick up on the streets and learn to play. I've been playing it all along, but it became the focus of my sports activity late in my high school years. And uh there's all sorts of great stories about basketball.

Basketball did more for me than any other sport. Um I remember I don't know what I'm going to tell this story. I don't want to tell the whole thing now because it wasn't my purpose to, but I I it just came to me. Um when I was uh we were on the state champion chess team and I kind of had a big mouth back in high school and I was a pretty good basketball player along with another chess player friend of mine named John Hoy. We were pretty good basketball players. We uh we uh we we challenged two players on the Proviso West High School basketball team to a twoon two game.

And I said, "Look, you know, we're not only state champion chess players, we're better basketball players than our basketball team."

that kind of came back at us because the president of the student body um um he he organized a twoon two basketball game at his house that brought out you know dozens maybe a hundred I don't really know how many people came out but there were a lot of people in his front yard for this basketball game and uh me and John were playing, we're both 6 foot3 and we were playing the um two of the best players on their team, a guy named um uh oh my goodness, I'll I'll tell this story better some other time, but uh we ended up playing them uh to a draw. Uh we played two games, they won one, we won one, and then it disbanded.

And uh I got to tell that whole story sometime. But uh the bottom line for me was that athletics led to opportunities. Basketball in particular led to all sorts of opportunities. So when I went off to college, I played inter mural basketball. And then when I went into my master's degree, I played inter mural basketball. Then when I went overseas and lived in Hong Kong, I played inter mural basketball at the university when I was pursuing a PhD in Asia. Um, basketball allowed me to integrate into different cultures, integrate into society, and to um kind of have a liberated feeling that I wasn't just a brain on a stick, but I was an embodied person.

I ended up um playing basketball in Hong Kong. We the philosophy and religion department ended up winning the inter mural championship at Hong Kong Baptist University, a fairly large university. I think it was 30 or 40,000 students at the time. Uh if my memory serves, I could be wrong about that, but it was a big school. And um we played all the way the ch we ended up playing against the physical education department, as you might imagine. I think they'd won 15 or 20 straight years. And this particular year with this Caucasian guy and a couple of good uh players from their team in the philosophy and religion department, we took them on for the championship and we won.

It was just an invigorating moment. It was a ton of fun. And uh I will have to relate that story some other time as well. But basketball took me there. I ended up playing after the season was over and we went where we won the inter mural championship. They asked me to play on a team that was playing on television. Um there was a relegation league and this team had just made it into the professional ranks as the new entry because they won the relegation league and they asked me to come and play center for them against the number one team professional team on television.

So, how could anybody resist such a thing? I ended up going to uh a large um auditorium uh I guess it was a stadium and we played on national television. I was the center. I did the jump ball. I remember going out for the for the uh you know the national anthem and to meet some of the other players who were on the number one team in in uh in the Asian League at the time. Their front line was all 6,11 and 7 foot guys. He said, "Hey, how you doing?" They're all Americans who playing ball in Italy or playing ball in Asia. So, I got to meet these guys and they go, "Hey, how you doing?"

I said, "I'm not doing well anymore now that I realize that I'm playing against you guys." Anyway, we got destroyed in that game, but basketball took me into the professional leagues for one game and allowed me to play on uh national television for one game. That was pretty cool. Um, I then went on to play with a team that marched into China and played the um the uh People's Liberation Army team and uh we we traveled in China, had some games there and um basketball was just an amazing addition to my life story. You know, you think, hey, this guy's a philosopher, you know, how how much does he know about athletics?

Well, athletics has just been so good to me and such a great metaphor cuz I I I began to believe if I can do that in basketball, I can certainly do that in intellectual uh uh venues um like I was starting to move in. Okay. Well, after basketball and those amazing experiences, I' I've played a lot of basketball since then, but nothing quite as exciting as all that. I did uh I did in the uh in the years after playing with John, we shifted from basketball over to biking.

Um, one of the things John Ho and I decided to do and I I'm going to try to interview him at some point here because John and I ever since we picked up these bikes together one summer back in the mid 80s um I guess it's the mid to late 80s. I can't remember the exact maybe was it No, no, no. It was the early 90s. It was I think 1990 or so. Anyway, uh we have both just talked about how this uh experience on bikes that we went on together changed our lives forever. Uh it was the summer before I I met my wife or who the the girl who would become my wife.

I had some time off and I had a little bit of money in my pocket from my student loan and don't tell the government. Um and um John and I decided that we're going to get rid of our rental apartment that we had together and I was going to school out of this house uh out of this apartment in Hoffman Estates and I was traveling up to Deerfield for my master's degree. We were going to buy a bike um and then throw the bike on an airplane and we were going to go to Europe and spend the summer in Europe. What other time are we going to have to do this?

So, John and I had some money. He was working like carpet installation and I I was doing the student thing and helping him with some carpet installation uh as a as a kind of summer job. And uh we got rid of our apartment. We bought these bikes over at the store. We outfitted these bikes with paneers and lights and uh racks and we got helmets and you know water bottles, everything one could need. and we bought tents and we bought uh cooking gear and we bought tickets to Brussels, Belgium that were 54 days apart. I remember the days because we started counting them after a while.

We'd spent 54 days biking through Europe, living in our our our tents and camping and biking and camp. We went throughout France and into England, actually, and then back to Belgium. And what an incredible, excuse me, what an incredible summer that trip of just being out there self-reliant, trusting that, you know, you know, God will will allow these two young guys with the physical fitness that they had in them to be able to bike throughout Europe to see the world a little bit um together while we are still young.

that uh that trip. I mean, we talked about that for years. I've got I when I interviewed John, I were going to go over that trip in detail. We kept some notes on it. It's now, you know, it's now quite a ways off. 30 years ago, um maybe more than 30 years ago, for 35 years ago that we did that. Uh but it but it became something that allowed us to dream bigger dreams in the intellectual world or in the in in the other other dimensions of human life. Like I said, I'm going to interview that guy somewhere along the line here because man, there's just so much positive that happened in that trip.

After that biking experience, it became clear that life got too busy and I wasn't going to be able to take an entire summer to bike through Europe again. So, I took up I I was still going down to Arkansas to see my parents. I decided to take up mountain biking. And you know, when I started having kids, mountain biking was a nice middle ground for me athletically because it allowed me to do biking, but to do sort of um uh adventurous bike biking with shorter time frames. You know, you can't go for days on end. I guess you could go for days on end mountain biking, but you can go out there for an hour and really have a fabulous experience in the mountains and streams and on the trails and uh and so forth.

So, I started mountain biking because my dad and my mom live down in Hot Springs and they've got some really cool mountain biking trails. Now, mountain biking wasn't a big thing back then. I was doing it mainly because I knew about these trails that were close to his home. It has since exploded and I now live down in Hot Springs. Um, and the Northwood trails, the Lake Deg Gray trails, these are like worldclass mountain biking trails and we get a ton of people spec especially on the weekends. But when I was mountain biking out on these trails uh 20 25 years ago, um there was nobody but me, of course, and my kids.

I started um taking my oldest son, Matthew, mountain biking, and he got to a point where he could ride them himself and um you know, and and he would ride along with me and uh uh one on one particular ride, this is well known in the Firestone household, uh I was going downhill on a blue trail near Bull Bayou and uh I just had my bike tuned up. And what I didn't realize is that when when you put brand new brakes on a bike, they grip really well. I'm flying downhill in this rocky area and I must have squeezed my front brake a little too hard. It gripped. It locked up and it threw me over the bicycle. I did a complete somersault and landed on my back.

Um Matthew comes I'm just laying there totally immobile. Matthew comes up behind me. Young kid, I think he was 10 years old at the time. and he's got those big eyes. I what do I do? I fortunately I had a cell phone on me. It was a rudimentary cell phone back then, but it was cell phone. He was able to call my dad. My dad and daughter Hannah came rushing out to get me. They took me to the emergency room and found out I had three broken ribs and and uh ended up needing to uh to drive 12 hours back home with three broken ribs.

That is not something easily done. So I had to call my buddy Nathan Jacobs who happened to be in Arkansas for some unknown reason. I can't remember why he was there. He and his family were there. They were up by um I think um up in the northwest of Arkansas at the time. They came down and then the two of them, his wife and and and and him drove the two cars kind of caravan style back up north. Mountain biking, Matthew and I. Mountain biking can be dangerous. Um especially if the gear you have isn't quite up to snuff. I had sidepool brakes. I didn't have any suspension at the time. I was just doing my own thing on the mountain biking trails here in in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

Well, in the years since, I've gotten a little more sensible, gotten a little bit better bike. Um, the other kids have bikes as well. Uh, Emma, Rebecca, and Andrew are into biking in the mountains. They go with me all the time when they're in town. Um, this summer, for example, Rebecca's been riding a lot with me. We've been doing some fun, uh, Northwoods riding. Um, Emma has ridden many, many times with me. She's the one uh of the Firestones who went down to Hot Springs because of this beautiful nature and because of a great school called a Baptist University. She ended up going to school there.

She really got used to the mountains. So, she runs them and she ran them, I guess, and and also mountain bike them. She taught at a local, excuse me, grade school as well and utilized the mountains all the time. Um she's since now left uh uh Arkansas and now lives up in the Chicago area and is doing some other things. But um all this to say that the kids love mountain biking and it's so fun to be able to be physically fit and to be able to translate that or trans uh transfer that over to your kids and they can see the value of these sorts of things.

So, I'm passing on, if you will, a love of the body and training through these kinds of experiences. Um, to take care of yourself, to uh enjoy life, be adventurous, train your body, perhaps don't push the limits. Well, when you do, you're going to fall. Get back up, get back on the trails, um, and um, and go from there. Now, um there are other physical things that I've done. I did take up running for quite a long time. I think it was for 10 years. I would basically run somewhere between 1 mile and 12 miles depending on how fit I was and what what the timing was.

But I loved running and ran for quite a long time. I don't run quite as much as I used to, although this summer I've been running again um because of uh things I'll talk I'll talk to you about in a minute. But, uh running for fun and and fitness is um is probably I mean I've done a lot of things, but there's no more bang for your buck if you're trying to get in shape than running in my opinion. You can go to the gym, you can do other things, but if you're wanting to lose 10 pounds, put a month of running in. If you're wanting to get your cardio up and up and going, start running. Now, you don't have to run fast. Just jog. Try to get some mileage. Try to hold the hold fast at that mileage and edge it upward.

Increase your speed a little bit at a time. Do these sorts of things. And it is just an extraordinarily good thing to do for yourself. I was able to pass that along. Not so much to the older kids, although I think Matthew uh in particular picked it up. He's the one who ended up in uh in special forces. Uh so he definitely picked up the running and the biking uh more than some of the other older kids. Um but uh Andrew and Rebecca in particular, they're the ones who really picked up running. Um, Rebecca is, as it turns out, all of our kids have gone to college at some point.

Uh, Rebecca's the only one who's actually was a collegiate athlete. So, she um was able to run cross country for a major team. One of the years she was on the team, they won the uh national championship. And uh she's made running part of her life. She's going to be a senior at the time of recording here. um and uh is going to finish up her running career here this coming year. Andrew ran cross country in high school and it was just and I think Andrew would testify.

I'm going to have to interview all of these kids at some point or another, but I think Andrew can testify to the fact that um being physically fit enough to run on the cross country team in high school. I remember when he first broke the 5-minute mile. I mean, just the elation, the realization of what he was capable of was was really important, but also the social dimension of running. Uh you wouldn't think that running is a social sport. At least I wouldn't. You go out and you run. But they ran together and he met some great great classmates uh through running more than any other sport that he was in.

And that was one of the things I think that really attracted him to running. And so they were able to pick these things up and do far more than I was ever able to do in that sport. Um, and I'm just so proud of them. But also, I see this physical side spilling over into the spiritual, spilling over into the mental. They're very competent college students. They're very uh h um I think engaged churchgoers. And uh it's just nothing nothing the parent wants to see more than that kind of holistic development in their kids.

Let me just uh close off talking about athletics by one more running thing. One of the things I've been able to do with them is during the summers during the fourth of July there's this race. It's called the uh Fourth of July fun run at Lake Degra here not too far from Hot Springs, Arkansas. and Emma is uh one who runs in this. Now Andrew and Rebecca also run but because they are um you know crossc country runners and it's a little I don't know if it's not unfair but every year that they run they have either won or taken second place in this late degree race in the men's and women's categories.

Emma runs and she has took taken on running um kind of late in her in her uh in her development. She's in her mid20s and she likes to run and she comes down also to run in the late deg gray race. I'll just tell one story about this. Um, one year they came down and I think Andrew won first place in the men's division and Becca won first place in the women's division in the 5K. And uh, Emma was in this thing and uh, we all said, "Man, that was a great run, Emma. Congratulations. I'm glad you completed the run."

Anyway, as we were leaving, they called uh, well, we have the champion of the women's division from the 18 to 25 year olds, and that's Emma Firestone. like what? Emma won the 18 to 25 year old division. That's because Rebecca, the collegiate runner, won the whole women's thing. She couldn't They don't give two prizes. Emma was actually first place in the 18 to 25 year.

She was so excited and we were all kind of excited because of this surprise victory uh that she had and it again uh added something sort of vital to the Firestone story and uh I think Emma's story in particular cuz we always knew Emma was a great athlete but she never really joined athletics like some of the other kids did but here in her um I guess it was early 20s at the time she was able to make a comeback in these areas and how she runs all the time. She's going to be running in the race um this coming Fourth of July, which is coming up shortly here.

And uh um and you know, by the time I actually post this video, it'll probably be several months uh down the road, but uh maybe I'll tell more stories here, but uh she she'll she'll be running again. and uh just just such a uh such a fun thing to see that side of the the of their development taking off. Well, let me get here to the moral of the story here. Um the body I have always found to be a fantastic metaphor for the rest of the human person. We migrate between sports more quickly as we grow up. Uh sometimes that's just because of physical limitations. You I moved from primarily running to biking because my you know legs didn't react to the running quite as well as they used to. I still run but I don't run like I used to run. Biking is much more uh accessible to me and still has all those fun challenges and opportunities that come along with it.

You know, if we're thought about thoughtful about it as we grow older and we train well with age, we can you can do this, you know, right on into old age, we get smarter because I I think out of necessity if you continue to do it because the margin for error um gets smaller. You know, as you get older, you know, you can't overcome injuries quite as quickly. So, you're a little more careful and thoughtful about how you train the body. Um, nevertheless, I think some of the stories I've told here, um, show that sports and training can allow you to go places and do things that others can only dream about.

It opens doors. Just as basketball allowed me to go play um in college, it allowed me to play in the streets of of of of uh of Hong Kong. It allowed me to play on TV. It allowed me to play against the People's Liberation Army in China. Um, so your your your commitment to sports can take you places and allow you to experience things that are singular, that they're life affirming and they're formational for you. And so I would I would think that you'd not want to miss out on those. And you know, there's a time for everything under the sun as it says in Ecclesiastes.

and Emma waited into her mid20s before she really got into it. Uh Andrew and Rebecca went earlier and deeper into athletics. I think Matthew has been steady throughout and Hannah is even a pretty good athlete. She's particularly comes alive in family events like when we play flag football or something with frisbees, I forgot the name of the game and other things like that. We see, you know, how good she can be in those realms as well.

Um, in my current work as a professor, staying in shape has lengthened my career and given me, I think, some credibility with students. We run, we bike, we hike, we walk, we even swim together sometimes. That's particularly possible down here in Arkansas. This allows natural conversations and shared life experiences. And I have found with students that some of the most profound learning moments happen when you're doing life together. And for young people, the physical side is the fun side, is the side where lots of things happen. And so professors who are approaching 60 like myself um who are able to do that have a unique access point in their working with students.

You know, in the honors program here at Champion, we have uh we we uh we make our classes portable. They're on the move. Sometimes we do them while we're hiking. We'll go out somewhere and we'll do roundt discussions out in the middle of nature. We'll go to coffee shops. We'll bike together and talk uh talk philosophy and theology and the big questions of life. These things are only possible because of body care and skills acquisition. If you've lived a holistic life, one that uh takes the body seriously.

The human being, I would argue, has an unbelievable potential. I saw that in my biking through Europe, for example. And we first discover this, I think, in our bodies. As we push them, as we grow, we those that element of the human person grows right away. We see results uh early on. And uh and it becomes, I think, a a a powerful metaphor for developing in other areas of life. So managing the body over time is another way we learn about managing the rest of ourselves, the mind and the heart in particular. They all need to be tended to. Yet we can and indeed must occasionally push our bodies beyond what we what we thought they were capable of doing.

I was able to bike 1500 miles around Europe and I think you can too if that is your stick or is that something that you know seems appealing to you. Always be prepared to make your potential actual. I think that's one of the big I think takeaways from this. It's one thing to watch somebody do something and say I could do that if I tried. It's another thing to do it to transcend what you're currently capable of and make it part of your life story.

If you can, then at some point I think you should. There's a vital warning in all of this. We saw that in Paul. Paul's metaphor of the trained runner exemplifies the point of using the body, training the body. Yet, we also find in Paul the admonition to beat this body to make it his slave. He says the Bible warns us not to celebrate or so celebrate the body. Um because the flesh threatens to take over our whole being. The flesh is weak but the spirit is strong. Guard your heart while you're developing the body. Use your mind well to foster the heart and the body and help guard them and keep them.

This is easier said than done and uh it's one of the big challenges of life. This is why we go to church, we go to school, the spirit and the mind and the body all matter. Socrates is famous for saying that the unexamined life is not worth living. I would argue that the holistic life is the only one worth living. Now, this is not to say that if you're a parapolgic or you're in a comeomaosse state that life is not worth living. I believe life has intrinsic value. But that only I really only want to say here that we should maximize the potential that we have been gifted with in all dimensions of life.

That's a big ask. I know sometimes we get tired. I've get tired. Sometimes we're in valleys. We wonder whether or not we can do it. Sometimes we add a few pounds and we wish you know we don't think we'll ever get get back to any sense of normaly. Nevertheless, we need to work hard on ourselves physically in order to live long and prosper. This is done I would suggest to you from these stories and from my own life experience that through training. And when it's done well, it becomes a fantastic metaphor for living a holistic and good life. Anytime you take on these kinds of challenges, there will be setbacks and times that you just don't think you can do it.

You can do it. And I would suggest that you must do it. All right. Well, that's it for the Firestone File today. I got so much more to say on some of these topics, but uh God bless you and uh I hope that this has been useful to you in some way. Bye for now. Thanks for stopping by to spend some time with me here on the Firestone Files. I hope today's reflections offered you some new insights and perspective on life. If you enjoyed the episode or found it valuable, I'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to like, subscribe, and share it with someone you care about.

I'd also love to hear your thoughts. What resonated with you? What challenged you? or what would you like to hear more about in future episodes? Drop a comment below or send in your suggestions to the email in the description. Your input helps shape where we go next. This has been Dr. Chris Firestone. Until next time, keep asking the big questions. And remember, the kingdom journey is always best with your friends. Further up and further in. Bye for now.

Turn it around.