Run your own race

I’ve been doing a lot more running lately since being roped into this race called Ragnar. 🙂 I’ve thoroughly enjoyed training my body to be able to withstand further and further distances at greater and greater speeds. I laugh to myself the day of long runs as my knees (and my lungs and my back and my abs and just about everything else) recover from whatever I just did to them. I relish shorter tempo runs, as my body is naturally more built for speed than for distance. I live for competition, whether against myself or others. I frankly don’t care how well someone else is doing, so long as I, for my part, am doing well. So you might say running suits me. For now. At least until I can’t bear the thought of my newly developed cankles getting any more pronounced. 😉

But while running, at least for little lone ladies like myself who run where other people are, you often see others at the same toilsome task as you. The competitor in me automatically intakes the details of how fast they are going, how fit they appear, whether I could outrun or outlast them, their age, and so on. It’s inherent. How do I rank? But what I have had to remember from the beginning, perhaps particularly in running, is that there is my race and there is not-my-race.

Everyone else is running not-my-race.

Because little Susie Speed Demon who just outpaced me may be doing a speed trial the day I am doing a long run. Or when I bound past Simon Slowpoke, I may not know that he’s already 10 miles into his run when I’m only 2.5 into mine. I don’t know where the other runners around me have been or where they are going, so to compare myself to them may be a lot like comparing apples and oranges. The only day I know exactly where they’re going and where they’ve been is race day, and even then I have to focus on my race, not theirs.

Oh isn’t it the same in life.

Hebrews 12:1 carries new meaning for me lately:
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.

That phrase gets me: The race marked out for us. It is long and will require perseverance for all of us. But the race that is marked out for me is different than the race that is marked out for you. Where has God called you? I can guarantee that it is not where he has called me. He calls some to be nurses, and others to be truck drivers, others to be pastors, and still others to be scientists. He calls some to start families and others to simply serve the family of God. He puts certain people in each of our paths that we relate to differently than any other. We have a race marked out for us, and the only place you are going to find your course map is in the hands of God. If you keep looking to other runners or trying to run your course like they are running theirs, you’ll probably trip up sooner or later, or just plain run out of wind.

So much like the people that I pass at the park or on the trail, let’s all encourage one another to run separately, together. There are various principles about running as a discipline that could apply to any one of us. But there are also specifications about where I am running and for how far and under which conditions that will differ from me to you. Let’s all push one another and encourage each other to stretch our capacities and run to the best of our ability, but let’s give ourselves and others the blessed freedom to run our own race. Amen?