​I recently read a story of a young lady, Sophia Dick, who was running a half marathon as part of the Cincinnati Flying Pig running series. The story caught my eye because I've run that particular race.

While reading the story, the plot took an interesting turn. Or better put, I guess, a wrong turn.

There's a place in the race where the full marathon runners go one way, and the half marathoners go another. I remember that place well because it was there that I thought, "Thank God I don't have to go with them!"

Well, Sophia missed her turn at that place and accidentally went with THEM.

Once she realized her mistake, she had two choices: turn around and finish the race she'd started, or continue on and finish a marathon she never wanted to start in the first place, and in doing so run a distance she'd never run before and surely hadn't trained for.

Sophia chose the latter.

A very cool part of the story is that she found herself in a pace group led by my friend and ultra running legend Harvey Lewis - Ultra Runner. Anyone who knows Harvey knows that if you've found yourself in a challenging place, you couldn't have a better leader.

Harvey has accomplished some incredible running feats in his career, but equally amazing to me, he's helped countless other people - myself included - accomplish more than they ever thought they could.

So, unsurprisingly, Sophia did it. She completed the marathon she didn't know she was going to run. And in impressive fashion: 3 hours and 30 minutes!!

After the race, Sophia said something profound. She said:

"Sometimes the wrong turn can take you further than the right turn ever could."

I mean, right? She did run 13 miles further than she would have if she'd taken the right turn.

But that's not the kind of further Sophia was referencing. She was suggesting that unplanned or unwanted experiences in our lives might result in growth we'd never get sticking with the original plan.

Or following the plan we thought we were supposed to follow.

That hits home with me.

I can spend a lot of time lamenting the life that hasn't gone the way IT WAS SUPPOSED TO GO. And I can get deeply stuck in that lamenting. Until I force myself to take account of all that the unplanned and unwanted directions in life have taught me.

Of all the gifts that have come into my life via the wrong turns.

I wonder how much time we waste believing the secret in life is figuring out the right and wrong turns, when the real secret is to just go.

Just freaking go.

I'm not trying to suggest a haphazard life. But I am trying to suggest once you're in the middle of a 'wrong' turn - make it right.

Lessons in life don't come from the right path, they come from being open to learning from whatever path you might find yourself on. There is NO path that does not teach to one who longs to learn.

Sometimes that's not the path you intended to be on. But I wonder: how many people have missed out on beauty in their life by deciding there's none to be found going the 'wrong' way?

If you feel like you're going the wrong way today, make it right!

Well done Sophia. Not just for your incredible marathon. But maybe more, for helping us all see some of the best finish lines in life are at the end of roads we never intended to travel.

​Some of the most important parts of life aren’t things we finish, they’re things we keep returning to.

I work in the world of healing. Helping people heal from trauma. From addictions. From broken and struggling relationships. Healing from emotions and thoughts that often take people to dark places.

Maybe the hardest part of showing up for that work is knowing the work will never end. There is no finish line. In fact, any imaginary finish line to the work of healing seems to be getting harder and harder to imagine.

So what does one do?

Quit?

I chatted with a dear friend yesterday who is feeling overwhelmed by mom life. Maybe parents understand this idea of showing up for work while knowing there is no finish line.

There is no final victory over caring for a child. The dishes return. The worries return. The conversations return. The need for patience returns.

Yet love makes repetitive work meaningful.

The same is true for healing. For friendship. For marriage. For faith. For kindness. For building community. For becoming a better person.

Some work has no end because life itself keeps happening.

Maybe what exhausts us is not the endlessness itself, but the expectation that meaningful things should eventually require nothing more from us.

But there is something deeply hopeful - for me - about continuing to fight the feel impossible to win. It means we still believe people matter. It means we still believe suffering is worth responding to. It means cynicism has not completely taken over our hearts.

Some days my greatest fight against darkness is to keep showing up in it. Some days my greatest source of optimism is making sure darkness knows I'm not giving up on the idea of light.

Perhaps that is one of the deepest forms of meaning available to us: not eliminating brokenness, but refusing to abandon one another inside it.

Some work in this world today feels without a finish line, but I am sure that's the work begging us to keep showing up.

​I stopped and looked out at the length of the pier. And it occurred to me in some silly way, someone actually built this thing.

Someone stood at the edge of the choppy and crashing waters and felt some need to go deeper into them, in spite of the chopping and the crashing.

And that someone wisely realized they did not have it in them to calm the waters, but insisted, still - there must be some other way.

Someone built that pier with a belief there is value in going further. Someone believed there was value beyond the shoreline. And isn't that what roads are?

Belief.

It wasn't lost on me that the pier allows one to leave the safety of dry land and move out over uncertain waters. Most meaningful roads in life eventually require us to leave something solid and familiar behind.

Healing does that.

Faith does that.

Growth does that.

Love does that.

New roads can be scary, but if we believe they can take us somewhere meaningful aren't they worth building?

And if we are waiting for the choppy waters of life to calm before building them, is it possible we are missing the entire point of building them at all?

Sometimes choppy waters are the real story; the pier is just the best way to experience and share it.

​Saturday was the 152nd running of the Kentucky Derby.

Before Saturday, no female trainer had ever trained the winning horse. Thanks to Cherie DeVaux, trainer of Saturday's winning horse Golden Tempo, we won't be able to say that at the running of the 153rd Derby.

Additionally, jockey Jose Ortiz won his first Kentucky Derby after coming up short in his previous ten attempts. (Narrowly defeating his brother who was riding the horse right next to him at the finish line).

And finally - the horse - the star of the show - Golden Tempo - was dead last entering the long Churchill Downs homestretch before passing every single horse to win the race. Not impossible to do, but rarely the path of this prestigious race's winner.

The Kentucky Derby is always filled with story lines. One of the beauties of the race telecast is hearing a day full of these stories. But maybe the biggest story in this one didn't come to light until after the race.

And that is this:

Almost everything can not be done, until it is done.

The older I get the more I come to believe impossible is a myth. And maybe the more we all believe in that myth the more impossible it is for us to chase our own possibilities.

Trainer Cherie DeVaux’s plan was to go to medical school, but when an advisor said she had to take a class in organic chemistry, “I just looked at her and said: ‘No, I'm going to go work on the racetrack.’ She's like: ‘Are you sure?’ and I was like, ‘I'm just going to see how it works.’”

See how it works out.

Often how things work out starts with how we see them work out.

Do I think it's impossible, or am I all in on the possibilities?

It's a great question to ask ourselves this week.

Do I think it's impossible?

A lot of what's ahead of you this week - and in this life - can not be done.

Until it is.

Golden Tempo saw the path from last to first.

Today, see your path....

And make what can not be done - done.

​I went to see a special 30th anniversary showing of Jerry McGuire last night. There's an iconic scene at the end of the movie when Dorothy tells Jerry McGuire: "You had me at hello."

Something hit me powerfully in that scene that hadn't hit me as powerfully the dozen times I'd seen the movie before. When Dorothy is saying "You had me at hello," she is surrounded by a sizable group of divorced women who'd all had to say goodbye to their marriages.

It made me wonder - fictionally speaking - are Dorothy and Jerry still married? Are they celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary this year? Or did they, like so many of the people in the room with them, have to learn to say goodbye?

I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve seen Jerry McGuire since my marriage ended six years ago. So maybe I wasn’t just watching the scene -maybe in some way I was sitting in that room.

I wonder if the women listening heard Dorothy's words with some cynicism. I wonder if they, like me, were all too aware that "hello" is the easy word to say in a marriage. We romanticize the moment of connection - “you had me at hello” - but relationships are built - or broken - by the words that come after.

I fully know the power of "you had me at hello." I dated my ex-wife for less than 5 months then flew off to the Virgin Islands and got married. We knew the love language of connection quite well, emotional peak, our struggle came with with maintaining it.

"I had you at hello" can be deceiving. It can tempt you to believe marriage will always be as simple as hello. It's not. Because more important than hello, you have to be able to say things like:

“I was wrong.”

“Can you help me understand?”

“I feel ___, and I don’t fully know why yet.”

“I need…”

“I hear you.”

“Thank you for…”

“I’m scared that…”

“What do you need from me right now?”

“Let’s try again.”

“I still choose you.”

These were words not often - if ever - said in my marriage by either of us. I read them like a foreign language in our story. And when you can't find these words in a relationship, it's a steep and painful fall from "you had me at hello" to goodbye....

It occurred to me last night just how many love story movies end at the hello part. The emotional peak. They end at the promise of happily ever after without ever following the promise.

Maybe Dorothy and Jerry are still together. Maybe their hello has indeed turned into happily ever after. If so, I think that would make for a great sequel.

Maybe one I and many of us need to see.

Be reminded of the part where they fall in love - yes - but more importantly, the part where they learn how to stay.

​WHEN DOES THE ROAD TO SECOND CHANCES OFFICIALLY CLOSE?

I am a fan of Tiger Woods, even if I haven't always been a fan of Tiger's choices.

I wonder how many people could say that of me? I am a fan of Keith, even if I haven't always been a fan of Keith's choices?

I wonder how many could say that of you?

I have watched Tiger Woods grow up. Literally. In 1978, when he was 2 years old, Tiger was on the Mike Douglas television show hitting a golf ball with Bob Hope looking on. Many of us watched Tiger grow from that moment into arguably the greatest golfer ever. (An argument I'm not here to argue).

We also watched Tiger fail. Make many mistakes. Reveal his frail humanity.

I was caught off guard this weekend when news broke of what appears to be another frailty. Tiger was involved in an automobile crash and charged with DUI. Few facts about the circumstances have been released; I say that while suggesting that everything written on social media is not facts.

I was caught off guard because Tiger seemed to be beyond some of the demons in his life. More than once lately I've listened to Tiger talk and thought, he's really turned into a solid and thoughtful human being. Wise.

But then this....

As always in these high profile circumstances, social media has been divided into two camps. Compassion and humiliation. Prayers for recovery and memes poking fun. A rush to understand and a rush to judge.

It is interesting to read how many people suggest that Tiger has run out of second chances. It made me wonder - can we really run out of second chances?

Is there a day when that road closes?

I suppose that is why I am such a follower - a giant needer - of the Jesus story. Jesus came to tell us all, ONCE AND FOR ALL, that we will never run out of second chances. We won't run out because we won't ever stop needing them.

I can't picture Jesus standing at the face of the road to second chances making sure I can't enter. I also can't picture Jesus standing there holding a meme poking fun at my mistakes. Especially the mistakes that come with great burdens to me and the people in my life.

Maybe I can't picture it because I don't want to picture it. Mine is a life built on the foundation of second chances. I've awakened to over 20,000 new days in my lifetime; a very high percentage of them have started with some sort of longing for a second chance.

I understand why people grow weary of giving second chances. We tend to grow weary of giving second chances because we give them from a place of limited resources.

Our patience runs out.

Our trust gets thin.

We start to keep score.

But Jesus isn’t drawing from a limited well. If anything, the Gospels paint a picture of someone who is more weary of people staying stuck in shame than of people needing grace.

Our capacity to give second chances is nowhere near the capacity Jesus has to do so. Lord have mercy am I thankful for that. Because for as long as I live, I know one thing for certain:

I'm going to need that road to second chances to remain wide open.

​Every year on March 14, mathematicians celebrate Pi Day - the day that honors the number 3.14, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.

Pi is a strange number. It never ends. It never repeats. No matter how many digits we discover, there are always more hiding beyond them.

For centuries, some of the smartest minds in the world have tried to “solve” it. Computers have now calculated trillions of digits, yet we still haven’t reached the end.

And we never will.

Which, if you think about it, might make pi less like a math problem and more like a metaphor for life. Because I don't know if you've seen it, but I feel like we live in a world that can be pretty obsessed with solving people.

Scroll through social media for five minutes and you’ll see it everywhere. People reduced to headlines. To labels. To one bad moment. One bad opinion. One bad decision.

A slice.

We live in a culture that is constantly cutting people into slices of pie and deciding which ones deserve to be thrown away.

But life isn’t built in slices. It’s built like pi. Infinite. Complicated. Always continuing beyond the part we can currently see.

The more years I live, the more convinced I become that most of our problems begin the moment we start pretending people are finished stories. But they aren’t. None of us are. Every one of us is still adding digits.

A mistake isn’t the end of a person. A failure isn’t the final chapter. A painful season isn’t the whole equation. It’s just another number in the sequence.

The challenge, of course, is that the world prefers clean endings. Clean conclusions. Clean judgments. Pi refuses to give us that. It keeps going. Which is probably why circles have always been one of the most powerful symbols of life. A circle has no clear beginning or ending point. You can start anywhere and keep moving forever.

The circle of life, as the song says.

Some of us fall by the wayside.
Some of us soar to the stars.
Some of us sail through our troubles.
Some of us live with the scars.

And yet we are still part of the same circle.

If pi teaches this giant circle call us anything, it’s that some things were never meant to be finished. Not love. Not redemption. Not grace. Not the human story.

Maybe that’s why something as abstract as a math constant has managed to capture human imagination for thousands of years. Pi quietly whispers a truth we struggle to accept:

There is always more to the story.

More digits. More chapters. More chances to become something different than we were yesterday. Which means the person you are today isn’t the final number in your sequence. And neither is the person standing next to you.

So today is Pi Day.

Celebrate the math if that’s your thing.

Celebrate the pie if that’s your thing too. (Apple with ice cream still gets my vote.)

But maybe the real celebration is remembering something deeper:

None of us are finished equations. We are still unfolding. Still expanding. Still adding digits to a story that, if grace has anything to say about it, might just keep going forever.

​A dear friend lost her mom last week. In talking about it, she suggested that with her losing her mom, who has always been an important part of her life, and with me in the middle of a radical work life shift, we are both adjusting to new normals.

I told her that's life to me. Always adjusting. Because every day is a new normal. If there even is such a thing as normal.

I mean, what the heck is normal anyways?

What is a normal day?

Who is a normal person?

What exactly is a normal life experience?

It seems to me normal is what makes us feel most comfortable. It's the parts of life we find most consistent and predictable. It's the people and situations that we prefer.

But all of that - comfort, consistency, predictability, and preferences - it's all fleeting. Whatever feels normal - it normally doesn't stick around long.

Certainly not forever.

So to me, adjusting to a new normal isn't just a part of life - it IS life.

It's acknowledging that every day is going to be a surprise of some sort - every day WILL require some form of shifting - and the healthiest kind of life embraces a mindset committed to finding a way to navigate the shift and not be derailed by it.

It's true; today I am adjusting to a new normal.

And I will again tomorrow.

Getting good at the adjusting - that's the secret.