Baby Steps
By Stephanie Morrill
What causes a sane person to get out of bed early on a Saturday morning and go run in the drizzly cold?
This was the thought running through my head as my husband’s alarm went off at 5:45 a.m. On a Saturday. The one day a week that we have a blip of a chance of sleeping in. (This is assuming our 4 year old and 18 month old decide to sleep past 7.)
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| Ben stretching after a long morning run. This is not what I would look like after running 15 miles. |
The other thought going on was, “How did I wind up married to a runner?” Ben has always been good about exercising, but it’s only been in the last year or so that he started running on his lunch break at work, just to stay in shape.
One day he came home and said, “I ran a 5k today during lunch today,” which really wowed me. I asked if he had any interest in doing races, but he said he didn’t, that it was just good exercise.
Then he crept up to 5 miles over his lunch hour. Then 7.
After a while, he got to know some of the other people at his company who ran over lunch. Most of them regularly compete in marathons.
“They made it sound kind of fun,” my husband told me.
My husband found an 18 month training schedule on-line and started his routine. He’ll run his first marathon in April, and every time I think of that—of the feat of training your body to run 26.2 miles—I’m a little stunned. A little awed.
And pretty stinkin’ humbled.
Because how many times have I said I would like to do something like:
Change my prayer life
Exercise regularly
Be better informed about the world
Know my Bible better
Read National Geographic (instead of just admiring the pictures)
Journal
Document all the cute things my kids say
Reach out to my neighbors
but yet I never do any of it?
Maybe you tend to be like me, where you can see who you want to be and what kind of activities you want to fill your day with … only nothing ever really changes. They almost feel too big to embark upon. Or even when you have tried to pray more or read better literature, your enthusiasm fizzles and you return to being the same ol’ you.
And maybe you’re not so bad (God’s pretty crazy about you, you know) but you have this voice inside you urging you to be more. Something I struggle with is that I have so many GOOD activities filling my life, I’m not able to make time for what’s BEST. And I want what’s best for me, not just what’s good, don’t you?
When it’s a dark, drizzly Saturday morning, my husband doesn’t feel enthusiastic about running. Living a reinvented life isn’t easy. It takes being intentional. It takes grit. And it takes baby steps.
I cannot reinvent my prayer life or my eating habits overnight, but I can find one thing that I can change today to get me closer to who I’d like to be.
What’s something in your life you would like to change?Are you tired of getting entangled in toxic friendships? Do you have a weakness for the wrong kind of guy? Leave a comment below or email me and together we’ll brainstorm a next step for you and others who are struggling with the same stronghold.