Okay, the words aren't really from Kevin Bacon. I found these marvelous words on the blog of a friend of a friend; which made me think of seven degrees of separation, which clearly leads to Kevin Bacon. All that to say, I read this and my heart sighed. It found a kindred spirit in Mr. Bacon. Therefore, I will let the words "he" wrote speak for my heart...
We are running marathons. Nothing is a sprint except an actual sprint.
And yet, I think in terms of sprints. I think short-term, I think here and now and do little to consider the future. I do it with relationships, friendships, finances and more; whatever feels good now is what I'll do. I distill my world to 140 character status updates, and do not consider the punctuation marks I use may not be correct. The place I put a period may be where God wanted a semicolon, changing what I thought was an end into merely a pause. I don't look far enough ahead to understand the difference.
The question I struggle with is how am I to learn to live a marathon life in a world that thinks in sprints?
I want to train to pace myself, to work up to the hills and stretch the parts of me that get overworked along the way. I want to understand that the blisters I get are not because I'm a terrible person or a failure, but because I am a person who is running and blisters happen to runners. In the marathon world, I must pay close attention to what I take in and where I'm going. If I'm to run the race marked out for me, training for the long-distance and not the immediate future is the difference between standing at the finish line and giving up before I can see it.
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