Hamsters and Treadmills

 

I heard a whirring sound in the hallway.  It might have been a distant fan or perhaps zephyrs blowing in from the coast.  Actually, the sound was simply Pip working out.

Pip is a Syrian Hamster, a little fellow who sleeps all day and runs on a treadmill all night.  Actually, it isn’t exactly a treadmill he runs on, it is a wheel, but the concept remains the same.

The modern treadmill dates back to 1817 when an Englishman by the name of William Cubitt became bothered by the idleness of prison inmates.  Obviously in the early 1800s, there wasn’t much on television, but the prisoners still did little with their time while they waited for the end of their imprisonment.

With this in mind, Cubitt came up with the concept of a treadmill – or treadwheel.  It was simply something that prisoners needed to walk on for hours each day to teach them to “be industrious.”  Long before prisoners took up making license plates, they were walking on a treadmill, grinding the air as they worked out their sentence of “hard labor.”

It is amusing that in two hundred years, the treadmill has morphed from something that prisoners were forced to do in order to teach them the dangers of idleness to something that most gyms have installed to help the industrious to burn calories.  These days, many people simply do not burn enough calories with their normal work and apparently need to emulate these early Victorian prisoners.

Many people purchase treadmills with the expectation that these calorie burning devices will enrich their lives.  A surprising number of these exercise machines sit idle – in surveys approximately one third of treadmills sit in a corner, collecting dust, while their owners do other, less strenuous activities.

“But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.” (James 1:22)

A surprising number of people own Bibles but never open them.  When they do find their way into a pew, the message they hear from the pulpit does little to impact their lives.  Like the treadmills in the basement, the Bibles and sermons collect dust, changing nothing except, perhaps, to make the owners feel better about their level of spirituality.

It would be better to be like Pip.  He requires no external motivation, he simply has a drive to run and so run he does – every night.  If you want to, you don’t have to is true whether you are talking about treadmills or Bible reading.