Running lately...

I'm still running...some days it feels like running on empty, both literally and figuratively. And then some days, I feel like I could run for days. Days, I tell you.

Three separate miles. Two slow.
One at my current fastest pace.

Monday, Wednesday, Friday is bootcamp day, and on those days I go to boot camp early...early, early. And then I usually run two miles or less after. Why? I just love to run. And I need it. So I go. Today, my sweet son...the LegoMaster (yes, that will be his new name), asked me to take him fishing after my workout, so I decided that I would finish my run at the pond where he would fish.

Beautiful setting. Absolutely beautiful. Not a super long loop, though, so I had to go several times around. The local cross country team was also running at this park. And it made me think back to high school.

How many times since high school I have said to myself, "Self...you should have run cross country in high school...why did you not run in high school?" The answer is simple...and not so simple. I was painfully insecure in high school. You would never have known it to look at or talk to me, but I was...so...insecure.

And not one of my mentors was telling me or teaching me to find my identity in Christ. Instead I think the youth theology of the 90s was more about abstinence (also a good lesson) and staying away from parties. Oh how I wish someone would have told me to really read the words in the Bible where God tells me what He thinks about me. To soak it in. To memorize it and repeat it until you believe it. To speak it out loud in moments when I would doubt.

Beautiful morning for a run...

I never chose team sports other than tennis and cheerleading. Tennis because if I lost, it was on me. Cheerleading because I was good enough to not lose and usually losing didn't depend solely on one person. I hated PE and organized activities of any kind because I feared looking foolish and people laughing at me.

So, why wouldn't cross country have made sense? I guess because I doubted my ability back then. Because I only ran four miles a day and often had to stop for breath in between mile two and three. I don't know. I didn't need many excuses to not participate. One would do when it came to sports.

But I watched these girls run, so fast and so strong around and around, up and down, cutting a path in the grass. Their legs were strong. And of course, my mind wandered to "If I had been running more back then, I wouldn't have needed my eating disorder quite so much..."

A lie. Because I needed it long before high school. I needed it to survive at the time. And running would have just accelerated the problem earlier than my college years.

If I'm honest, it matters very little if I had chosen to run in high school, or jump or skip or leap. The issue wasn't my choice of activities. The issue was my heart...and my lack of understanding about who I am created to be...and whose image in which I was created.

I wish, not so much that I had run or even made different choices. I wish that I had known what I know now...that God made me to be amazing. Not because of me or anything that I am on my own. But because I am made in His image...and He is amazing...and that makes me amazing. I am nothing on my own. I have everything because of Him.

Oh, if I had known these things, the different choices would have come naturally. They would have been easy choices because I would have known who I was and what I was created for...His glory.

So, today I ran. And I watched those precious children of God run ahead of me and alongside of me. And I pray that they know how precious they are. That they are His. They are fearfully and wonderfully made. And no number on the scale will ever make them more worthy, no amount of miles run will ever make them more worth saving in His eyes. No relationship with a boy or attendance at parties or participation on a team will ever make them enough.  It is Him who makes us all enough. Only by His grace...only by His blood. Nothing on our own. Nothing apart from Him.