Post from July 13, 2023

“👟 RSD 1171 ✅ It was a special run day (and I didn’t do math on the numbers for today’s verse—I instead used one of my favorites about running). Today’s run was 3.2 miles at 3 Mile Thursday for what’s called a Streak Runner’s “Gump Day” (how long Forrest Gump ran in the movie: 3 years, 2 months, 14 days). Unlike Forrest, my feathers are in my hair instead of following me around en l’air. 🪽

Today’s Verse: “Let me run loose and free, celebrating God’s great work, every bone in my body laughing, singing, ‘God, there’s no one like you. You put the down-and-out on their feet and protect the unprotected from bullies!’”— Psalms 35:9-10 (The Message groups 9 & 10 together)

Do you ever just want to try things? Or, perhaps this is you (it’s been me): you just want to do something different and don’t know what it is? You just want to do something? So, you just show up one day to something to see what happens? Maybe it’s an art class or an online computer science course or a new workout class. You know, you’re like, “Hey, I can be one of these people who can draw or code or who workout multiple times a week.” It’s intimidating, but the possibility of discovering something new about your life as it unfolds is exciting too. And, hey, if you think about it: that’s what we all did as kids. You know, when you’re a kid, you don’t see any problem with being a bakery owner/astronaut/ballerina/ actress—Oscar award winning actress because you’ll be great at it—and, when you become President someday, you’ll need a variety of life experiences. You love animals but decide that being a wildlife conservationist can wait until after that whole President thing, and you’ll still have time to move to Hawaii and open a surf shop: save the turtles 🐢 🫶🏻.

Think about it: little kids have more exciting life plans than a lot of us do. Why is that? Because of that whole pesky reality thing? True, you grow up and find out that you get motion sickness and don’t love physics, so astronaut becomes less appealing. You like cooking for yourself (cough on occasion cough), but you really don’t want to do it all day. Hollywood has a huge nepotism issue, and you love ballet but don’t want to ballet 25/8. Politics seems like a whole lot of arguing, and you can still love animals, even if you don’t move to Hawaii (the cost of McDonalds over there, am I right?). But, here’s what your little kid self did do for you: all those summers at science camp or years of ballet lessons or speaking parts in school plays or recycling projects at school opened your world to knowing many different things and, in turn, knowing things about you. Our childhood ventures taught each of us something intangible that is easy to forget in the sometimes drudgery of adulthood: that a lot of life really is just showing up.

“Showing up and showing out” is what my football boys say (it’s already a known saying in our societal lexicon, but they were the underdogs who went to the State Championship this year, so I’d say that’s a good endorsement). Basically, it’s an acknowledgment that showing up really means, “show up and try your best.” So, a personal anecdote (tl;dr work hard at what’s important to you, even if you’re not a natural at it…can skip to next paragraph). I’m not a natural athlete at all. I have to practice extra, train extra just to hit the standard other people hit with normal training (you know, that’s where their talent is…everybody’s got something they’re naturally good at, and some people are naturally good athletes, and they work hard too). E.g., I did extra classes (and years of extra training) in ballet that eventually paid off (Dance Masters of America and a job I love at the studio I grew up in 🩰💙🤍). Patience and tenacity: it’s a vibe. One of the most important parts of life really is just showing up. Trying new things and working at things, goals that we make and are important to us, even when we frustratingly only see centimeters of progress, help us to develop into who we’re supposed to be. Patience, tenacity, compassion, discipline, empathy (hey, everybody has something that’s hard for them), grit, faithfulness, hope—all of these things are developed in our journeys working for something.

In April of 2020 (yeah, this part is personal but explains the part at the top), that devastatingly impossible global situation was becoming more and more of a dumpster fire. The news was overwhelming and seemingly hopeless and sad, all the time. And, as a teacher of the Class of 2020, I missed my kids. Also, teaching Pre-Cal and Calculus online was just a bummer—I was teaching to an empty classroom, having to answer my own questions after an awkward pause like Steve from “Blue Clues.” Teaching ballet online was a bummer too. So, about that thing at the beginning: the “want[ing] to do something different and [not] know[ing] what it is”…April of 2020 was prime real estate for that. I wanted to get out of the house (and the school), away from the news, in the sun like a good hippie, so I began going to the track. I remembered running miles in middle school athletics, so I figured I should make myself run at least a mile non-stop each time. A friend of mine noticed (via our convos in FB Messenger) that I was going out every day, and (she’s an accomplished runner, so she knew about mile streaking) so she told me about mile streaking to see if I wanted to give it a try. I looked back in Nike Running and found the last “off” day I had: April 28, 2020. I was already almost a week into my running streak. So, why not try for 10 days? 10 days passed, so let’s try for a month. Y’all, I wanted a medal when I hit 30 days…those first 30 are no joke. Since I made one month, why not two? By then, I found out about Streak Runners International…you need 365 days…I decided, “let’s try for 100 and see what happens.”

“That day, for no particular reason, I decided to go for a little run. So I ran to the end of the road. And when I got there, I thought maybe I’d run to the end of town” — Forrest Gump. So, like Forrest did in the movie, as of today, I’ve been running for 3 years, 2 months, and 14 days, and I started out because, as Forrest said, “I just felt like running.” The thing about streak running is that, just like a lot of things in life, it’s just showing up. When you show up, you open yourself to learning things that you had no idea you could do, and you ahem run down paths that you had no idea were laid out for you. God is known for planting pleasant surprises in our lives…He’s good at the cleverly-disguised gift wrapping. I ran across today’s verse (see what I did there?) one day when I Googled “verses about running” while faith-sharing with a dear friend (who is also a runner…a boss, at that), and I liked the language the Message translation had, so I saved it. For a special occasion, I guess? Like dinner plates?

It’s a good verse, even if you’re not a runner. The author, our guy King David (you know, vs Goliath, Solomon’s dad…that guy), was celebrating God bringing him through a difficult situation (which is what God does on the regular) with his words in today’s verse. That language and imagery—we can just imagine ourselves in the freedom from fear and stress and all the “ick” things of life, even if it’s just for a few minutes while we’re doing something we really enjoy, something God gave to us to “put a little pep in our step.” It doesn’t have to be running: it’s really anything you show up for with a full heart, or something you show up for with a heart hoping. When we’re “‘down-and-out,’” God “‘put[s us] on…[our] feet,’” and looks out for us. God puts us in unexpected and wonderful situations when we just show up. “God’s great work” is found in every new opportunity and in second (third, fourth, etc.) looks at “old” things that somehow seem renewed when we look at them with fresh eyes: Vincent van Gogh once noted that “the best way to know God is to love many things.” So, do you ever just want to try things? Or, you just want to do something different and don’t know what it is? Well, just show up. “Show up and show out.” Try it. Don’t worry about big goals—goals are only little anyway (the big ones are a bunch of little ones stuck together…like those new Nerd Clusters gummies…it’s just a whole bunch of Nerds candy…but it tastes like victory, doesn’t it?). God wants us to experience things, both familiar and unfamiliar, because that’s how we learn to become more of who God made us to be. And, being someone who shows up just affords more of those experiences. Just show up, for the old and the new. I started my running journey with one mile. We could reach out to a friend with one text; try something new with one class; learn something new with one hour of study; get back into something we once loved by trying it again on one afternoon. When we think of it that way, anything big is really just one thing over and over. Lifetimes are built with one day, one hour, one minute, one second, over and over, always a chance to start new, to begin again. A long journey, hundreds and hundreds of miles, is not many miles. It’s only one mile many, many times.”