What’s Your Life Verse?

My pastor speaks about this concept of “life verses” often. He has two or three different life verses. He also regularly encourages us to find our own life verses. There are a few staff members that I pray with who also have life verses. I’m also fairly confident that my aunt has one. So what’s my life verse? I’m not entirely sure yet. Of the bible verses that I know, I would say the one that speaks to me most is Isaiah 40:31.

“But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.” – Isaiah 40:31 NKJV

Here’s why I like it:

1. It’s a reminder that I must wait. Based on my MBSR assignments and the whole non-striving concept, I think it’s safe to say that I can use a little more practice with this whole waiting thing.
2. It’s a reminder that my strength comes from the Lord and not myself. The word “wait ” is the Hebrew word “qavah” and the literal meaning of the word is “to bind together like a cord”. I read somewhere where the author used an analogy of a rope to explain “waiting”. Similar to our relationship with God, a rope is made of many strands. The more “strands” that we weave into our relationship with God, the more strength He gives to us.
3. It includes three little words, “they will run”.

I worked twelve hours today and after how I felt yesterday, work was one of the last places I wanted to be. I’m an introvert. At my conference I attended a session titled “Being an Introvert in an Extroverted Field”. We basically talked about what to do when you’re an introvert who’s exhausted from attending multiple college fairs and recruitment events each week and how to recharge from that. We also talked about knowing when to “turn it on”. In other words, hyping yourself up to make a good impression or execute a great event. That’s what I did today, I hyped myself up and mingled with 168 incoming freshmen and their parents, my staff, colleagues, and various administrators. So at 6 o’clock when it was time to go home, the furthest idea from my mind was to go for a run. I decided to anyway because I was inspired.

My best friend, not the one who was on the plant tour but my other one, (You can have more than one best friend. Hilary Duff’s character in Cadet Kelly proved that to us.) ran her first half marathon today. She was one of the thousands of people in Kansas City, MO participating in the Burns & McDonnell sponsored race, Rock the Parkway. She hasn’t been running long and finding time in her busy schedule to train was difficult. She suffered an ankle injury two weeks ago, but decided to stick with it. And I couldn’t be more happy for her!

A year ago today I ran my first organized half marathon. Funny enough, it was that same exact race. Not running much the two weeks leading up to it and dealing with shin splints, I was skeptical about whether I would finish. I finished with a time of 1:56:57 and was 1307 of 4226. It’s definitely my greatest running accomplishment to date. It might be my only running accomplishment.

My boyfriend and I have decided to run a 10K one week from today to officially kick off our marathon training. Despite being only a few days away, I’ve only ran twice in the last two weeks. I haven’t really been motivated to run and keep sleeping through my morning workout times. I’m also slightly discouraged because my pace is anywhere from fifteen to thirty seconds slower than what it was a year ago and I’m also about ten to twelve pounds heavier. And a small part of me doesn’t find running fun anymore. I’m not sure if he knows all of this. He might. He knows me pretty well. Which is why I think he decided to share this video with me, I Ran a Marathon with Only Ten Weeks of Training.

Michelle’s ten week journey was wonderful. Like I’ve watched it twice already, wonderful. And I’ll probably watch it one more time before the day is over. I can’t imagine training for a marathon in ten weeks. I trained longer than that for my half. Besides actually seeing her complete the marathon and hearing how much she’s learned about running form, proper footwear, and herself, I had two favorite parts.

1. When she had her mini panic attack. She mentioned that she never took into consideration how her personal life would affect her training. It definitely does. You can have a crappy day or emotional day and that definitely changes your mindset about your workout. But she still got out there anyway.
2. The night before the marathon when she gives her reason for why she’s running. “My whole life has always been doing things to please other people, so I’m running this race for me. I don’t need to prove it to anybody else.” Yes. Yes. Yes. One thousand times yes.

This video and my friend’s half marathon finish gave me the strength to go for a short run today. It was only three and half miles, but it was three and a half miles more than what I had committed to this morning.

A few months ago I read the book Unashamed by Lecrae. Great book, highly recommend it. And in the book he mentions during his adolescent years (which were quite troublesome) how he tried to embrace positive things and his natural talents, but would always fail. He realized that the reason why he continued to fail was because of a void that he later identified as Jesus.

I feel like that sometimes when I try new things or hobbies – being vegan, running, blogging, anything like that. I constantly have to restart being vegan or restart my training because I fail. And as silly as this might sound, I think it goes back to me relying on my own strength instead of the strength of God. Maybe Isaiah 40:31 actually is my life verse. Maybe it’s not. We’ll see.