What keeps you running?

I remember, very clearly, being a student at Unionville High School and watching people run around the track and having anxiety like you would not believe. That oval has always been foreign to me. In fact, the entire world of athletes and sports and fitness seemed to be my natural enemy.

It's hard to explain what's been happening to me in terms of my relationship with working out. I have two women that I meet with regularly to talk about our weight struggles and victories. When we first started meeting, I didn't believe my friend Pam when she told me that "one day, you won't be dying to eat fast food like you are now." I didn't believe my trainer when she told me that "one day, you will crave working out like you crave junk food now."

I thought they were crazy. I was very wrong.

There is a shift that happens when you choose that you are worth saving. This shift happens when I said to myself "I deserve a life better than this cycle of eating crap secretly and using food to fill the places in my heart that only God can fill." Most of us don't believe we are worth the unconditional love that God is offering to us. So we try to find that love in things that ultimately let us down, leave us more broken than we started, and put us on a path of self-destruction.

That's what food has done for me, and it showed on my physically. How many of us have those things in our lives, but the evidence isn't as obvious?

Yesterday morning I got up and I ran 4 miles. This morning I got up and I ran 4 miles. Running has become my thinking spot. I truly see Jesus Himself running beside me and showing me the path ahead and reflecting on the path behind. We have come so far. We all have. And the allusions to life that I get while I am running are endless. Hills, valleys, weather, speed, distance, all of it.

The one thing that struck me today, though, is this: I am never going back to how I used to be. How could I ever forget the things that God has shown me? It's like seeing with perfect vision for the first time and then choosing to be blind again. Why would anyone do that? Yet, we all do that to God in certain times of our lives.

Challenge for the day: keep running. Stay in the race, knowing that Jesus is with you. He might be taking you somewhere unknown, but it is somewhere better.

-Liz