Good morning! Rise and shine! Let’s start our morning calisthenics. Stretch those muscles and get everything limbered up and loose. Quads, biceps, triceps, hamstrings, shoulders, backs, and calves need our help after a long night of sleep. There’s a big day ahead.
Maybe that was a bit more ambitious than you intended for this Wednesday morning. I’m just trying to get you in the spirit of things because today is National Stretching Day. It’s a day to encourage us to do stretching exercises each day to help keep us limber and mobile.
Gone are the days of simple toe touches, sit ups, side lunges, and jumping jacks. These have all been replaced with more passive aggressive exercises. For instance, there is the “half split stretch that targets your hamstrings, calves, and glutes. Start in a kneeling position with your right knee directly under your right hip and your left leg fully extended in front of your body. Your left foot should be flexed. Walk your hands alongside your left leg until you feel the stretch in the back of your left thigh. Fold your torso over your left leg. If you feel some pull behind the left knee, bend it slightly. Bending your knee should also help you feel the stretch in your calf. Hold this pose for at least 30 seconds, then repeat on the right side.”1
A picture of the person doing it makes it look so simple. Try it and see how simple it really is!
There is an exercise called the pretzel stretch. Does that sound like a pleasant thing to do?!? If done correctly, it’s supposed to stretch out the quads of your bottom leg and the glutes and hip flexors of your top leg, as well as your spine.
The reclined spinal twist seems simple. Just lay on the floor with your arms outstretched and your back flat. Keeping your knees together, draw your legs up and twist so that your knees are flat on the ground. Don’t lift your shoulders while doing this. There will be a
gap under your lower back, though.
Before writing about this, I should have at least attempted these stretches. However, the athlete doing these stretches looked like they weighed about 100 pounds soaking wet and had a big smile on their face. Anyone who has to try that hard to sell me something makes me suspicious. Plus, if I pulled something (which was almost a certainty), I wouldn’t have been able to finish this devotional.
I abstained just for YOU! You’re welcome!
While my body is not made of elastic, my spirit must be because God is going to stretch my faith all the time. One of the ways he does that for me is in my role as a pastor. 1 Timothy 3:1 says, “This is a true saying, If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work.” The word desireth is the Greek word oregomai and it means “to stretch one’s self out in order to touch or to grasp something, to reach after or desire something.”2 God stretches me in His service.
This stretch continues in 2 Timothy 4:2. “Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine.” Preaching the word “in season” is as easy as rolling out of bed. Preaching “out of season” is the stretch of faith. It can feel like attempting to do all of the stretching exercises at once!
Serving the Lord stretches us every day. God takes us out of our comfort zone. He takes us to places we never would have gone, leads us to people we might have passed by on the street, and encourages us to “walk by faith and not by sight.”
Daily, we are stretched as we long more and more for Heaven. Hebrews 11:16 says, “But 
now they desire (they stretch for) a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.” Some days, it seems like we are doing all we can to stretch ourselves to be closer to the Lord. Our hearts stretch toward Heavenly things, wishing we could be home with Jesus and free from a world of care and sorrows.
One of the ways God wants to stretch us is to be willing to follow his example and reach those of our world deemed “unclean.” Let’s take Jesus’ example and allow ourselves to be stretched today to help the hurting. Mark 1:40-41 says, “And there came a leper to him, beseeching him, and kneeling down to him, and saying unto him, If thou wilt, thou canst make me clean. (41) And Jesus, moved with compassion, put forth (literally, stretched) his hand, and touched him, and saith unto him, I will; be thou clean.”
1https://www.self.com/gallery/essential-stretches-slideshow
2Thayer’s Greek Dictionary module, e-Sword computer program, e-Sword.net.
Images are taken from https://pixabay.com/, https://www.pexels.com/, or https://unsplash.com/images or created in Windows Copilot. According to the websites, they are Royalty Free and free to be used for our purposes.
