I have never been a runner.  Ever.  Just ask anyone who was on my sixth grade track team.  I desperately wanted to be able to run.  My sweet friend Gail was a runner like no other.  She broke every state record.  She was amazing.  I wanted to glide as easily and gracefully as she did around the track.  Unfortunately, that was not meant to be.

It was the day of one of the local track meets.  Several of our hundred yard dash competitors were out sick.  This was my big chance.  Actually, I was the only alternate available.  As we all took our places at the starting line, I knew I was out of my league.  I would have done anything to run the other way.  But the starting gun fired a shot (or was it a whistle?) and off we went.  Or at least THEY went.  One hundred yards suddenly seemed like a hundred miles.  Finally, I reached the finish line.  I came in sixth.  Out of six.  At that exact moment I remember saying my first cuss word out loud…

All this to say that today when I ran three miles (WITHOUT STOPPING!)  it was a really big deal.  Me.  The unrunner.  To suddenly feel the joy of running after all these years of striving for it.  Just a few weeks ago, I actually anounced that I would never be a runner and that I was okay with that.  I gave up the striving, the trying to be something I wasn’t.  And it was then that I discovered something in me that I never knew existed.  And it freed me somehow.

God seems to teach me this in my life in so many areas.  I try and I try and I try to be the “best” at everything that I think I should be.  As a wife, a mom, a daugther, a friend, a person. And I end up exhausted and out of breath and feeling like I always come in “sixth”. And I guess it’s the exhaustion that causes me to come to a place where I have to give up and rest and realize I can only be who I was created to be, even when that feels like it will never be enough.  Suddenly, there is a weight that is lifted and I am free to run at my own pace and enjoy the journey.  Instead of STRIVING, there is THRIVING. And then the run becomes fun instead of a chore. 

I will never break any records of speed with my running.  But to wake up before light and WANT to go out there and hit the pavement, that makes me feel like I’m winning every time.  Meet me at mile three?  I’ll be the slow one with the smile on her face…