​I have found my path. It's a gift to be able to say that. It's also a gift to remember that rarely does a path start as a path. More often than not, if we're being honest, our current paths started as our previous messes.

It's easy to forget in moments of saying, "man this feels good" - that we were once standing in a similar place in our lives saying, "man this sucks."

This sucks to this feels good - it is such a frequent order in my life.

It's easy to forget when you're out talking to a group about the power of meaningful relationships that your life has been filled with a pattern of broken relationships.

It's easy to forget when you're out talking to a group about the ease with which we can turn to unhealthy habits to ease the pain of unhealthy circumstances that we have spent a lifetime turning to unhealthy habits to deal with our unhealthy circumstances.

It's easy to sit and write as if writing is your calling, to forget how frequently you once refused to write when you felt called to write.

It's easy to promote healing and forget just how much broken you've had to navigate to even begin to know that healing is a thing.

It's easy to forget - but we must not.

Because the day is coming, maybe even today, when life will once again feel like a mess. And when that day comes, oh what a gift it is to know you are not standing in a mess, but at the beginning of a new path.

I have come to believe that God is not big on creating our paths, but he is especially big on showing up in our messes pointing us to them like an angel pointing to heaven.

Maybe we miss the angels when we get overwhelmed by our mess.

Maybe we miss them because we can't begin to believe a mess is the beginning and not the end.

Take stock of the good in your life today. My guess is - somewhere along the way, that good once looked like a mess. And so, my guess is - your next mess will one day look like a path.

From mess to path - it just seems to be the direction of my life.

​4 years ago today, I ran my last marathon. The memory of the pain I was experiencing in that finish line moment has long subsided, but the lesson - the much needed lesson - has carried on.

I ran the marathon with my friend Tiffany. It was her first marathon. She'd committed to running marathons before this one in 2021, but it just never happened. This one, though - she was determined to let nothing stand in her way of becoming forever a marathoner.

Throughout the training leading up to this, she would frequently say, "Whatever it takes."

And I dare say, that day, we did whatever it took.

For many reasons, most meaningful metaphor for life has become the marathon.

Maybe that’s because the marathon mirrors the way life exposes us.
It reveals every weakness, every fear, every corner of ourselves we’d rather not confront. There’s nowhere to hide at mile 22. Whatever is in you - good or bad - comes out. Trust me!

In many ways, life is the same. We don’t get to skip the hard miles; we just learn to show up for ourselves there.

Maybe it’s because the marathon forces honesty. There’s no pretending your way to 26.2 miles. No shortcut. No façade. Life, especially these last several years, has demanded that same honesty from me - to face my truth instead of pretending I'm strong.

The marathon helped teach me that pretending doesn’t get you to the finish line; truth does.

Maybe it’s because the marathon is a slow becoming, not a single moment. No one accidentally runs a marathon. You become a marathoner long before race day. You become one in the lonely early-morning miles, in the discipline of lacing up when no one is watching, in the quiet promises you keep to yourself.

For me, healing has been that same slow becoming - a thousand small, unseen steps that eventually add up to something that looks like progress.

Maybe it’s because the marathon is where I learned what “capacity” really means. Not capacity as in talent or physical ability, but capacity as in what we can endure, adapt to, and rise from. My first marathon and each after showed me I had more in me than I believed.

Life has shown me the opposite too - that sometimes we have far less than we pretend.

Both truths matter.

Both shape us.

Maybe it’s because the marathon is impossible to run alone.
Even if your feet are the only ones hitting the pavement, you’re carried by the people who trained with you, believed in you, prayed for you, and waited for you. Tiffany’s “whatever it takes” didn’t just get her across the finish line, it got me across too.

I’ve come to realize that's true for most of us - most of our finish lines come the same way: on the strength of the people who stay close when the miles get dark.

Whatever it takes.

Or you know, maybe it’s simply this:

In the marathon, as in life, the goal isn’t to feel good - it’s to keep going. And sometimes “whatever it takes” isn’t about finishing strong. It’s just about not quitting.

I am proud of this 4 year-old memory popping up this morning. Proud of Tiffany and proud of me.

But more than that, I am reminded:

Whatever it takes..... 

​In a recent podcast interview, Steve Bartlett asked Brené Brown, “Have you ever overcome anything?”

She answered, “Yes, I have overcome the belief that I will ever overcome anything.”

Those were timely and powerful words.

I am in the process of writing the final words of my book - the ending. And to be honest with you, I thought this would be the easiest part to write. After this long and often arduous process of digging up and writing the story of my life, I imagined that the words on the other side of all that digging would come easily.

They have not.

Why?

Because I’ve felt pressure - an internal pressure - to find some beautiful way to say look at all I’ve overcome while knowing, deep inside, that in many ways, I’ve overcome nothing.

I’ve wanted so badly to tell the readers who may find themselves in my story, readers who carry demons much like mine, here is how you overcome them.

Yet as I write this ending, here they sit. My demons. As present as they have ever been.

But as Brené Brown seemed to suggest, the story - our story - isn’t about exiling demons as much as it is about getting to know them.

Brown went on to say:

“I have overcome the belief that I will ever arrive. I am grateful for the skills that I have that keep me more aligned with the person, the mom, the partner, the leader I want to be. But I try to stay very mindful that I am scary when I’m scared. That I catastrophize very easily, and that’s painful for everyone around me. And that I don’t need to be liked—because now, the person I’m going to betray last is me. Now the person I’m going to betray last is me.”

And it hit me, what’s the point of writing the most honest version of your life you’ve ever written, only to finish it by hiding again? Why introduce the world to your ugliest and most haunting demons, only to end by giving birth to a few more?

We live in a world that wants every story to have a happy ending.
But does it? Should it?

What if life has nothing to do with arriving and everything to do with learning on the way to never arriving?

What if healing isn’t about getting rid of our demons, but about getting to know them - about becoming, somehow, more human to our demons than they are to us?

And what if the greatest pain a demon can bring is not in haunting us, but in pressuring us to pretend they’re not there, to keep betraying ourselves?

I really have overcome the belief that I will ever overcome anything. That no longer feels like defeat. Because the more I think and write about it, the more I realize - there is no happier ending to a story.

"Now the person I'm going to betray last is me."

​Do you want to change your week ahead before the week ahead even unfolds? Ok then, change your mind about the week ahead.

We have SO little control over the events awaiting us this last week of October, but we have FULL control over what our mind thinks about how we'll tackle those events.

Pastor Rich Wilkerson Jr. says, "God wants you to win on the inside before you ever see a win on the outside."

Let me tell you, I've spent a lot of my life with that equation inverted. I've spent a lot of my life waiting for victories in my life - praying for them even - so I'd have the chance to experience victorious feelings.

"Win before you begin," Wilkerson says.

Taking a victorious mind into the week ahead is the surest path to a victorious week. If we're going to wait until Friday to decide if the week has been victorious, chances are suddenly much greater that we'll experience the agony of defeat.

The events of my life rarely go the way I imagine them, so the alternative to knowing I'll be victorious through all events is to put my self at risk for feeling soundly defeated on the other side of them.

Win before you begin.

Before you take a step into your week, win it.

When you know your week ahead is going to be your week, nothing can shake what you already know. Faith doesn't dismiss that the week ahead may be full of challenges, it just refuses to let you easily dismiss that with God, no challenge has stopped you yet.

Don't wait until Friday to count your victories.

Count them right here and now.

​God's mission for our lives?

Growth.

Not perfection. Not arrival. Not applause.

Growth. Growth toward Him.

And the beautiful thing about God is that He doesn’t need the soil in our lives to be just right to nourish our growth. While we’re wondering when our season of flourishing will come, God is knowing that our season of growth is right now.

When it comes to growth, God doesn’t favor spring over summer, or summer over fall, or fall over winter, or winter over spring. With God, the season of growth is always now.

Today. This month. This year.

Right now.

So often we think, I’ve screwed up again. And God thinks, another chance to grow again.

So often we think, Why has this happened? And God whispers, Growth.

And so often we believe, This is it. I’ve arrived. And God reminds us, not yet. There is no arrival when there is still room to grow.

Grow. Toward Him.

We miss the value in so many days, so many seasons, when we lose sight of the mission: growth.

We use so many metrics to measure the worth of our days, the value of our lives. But God has already declared He values nothing more than us, and our worth is found in discovering that truth a bit more each day.

Discovering it in the joy and in the pain. In the easy and in the hard. In the summer and in the winter.

We may think there are seasons in our lives standing in the way, but God sees every season as THE way.:

Winter is coming. We can be sure of that. But hey, you’d be surprised what grows in the winter.

“Fruit trees of all kinds will grow on both banks of the river. Their leaves will not wither, nor will their fruit fail. Every month they will bear fruit, because the water from the sanctuary flows to them. Their fruit will serve for food and their leaves for healing.”

(Ezekiel 47:12)

Every month.

They will bear fruit.

​A dear friend recently said to me, "I get the impression that a lot of what you write is sometimes difficult but it's also incredibly inspiring to the rest of us."

Writing is healing for me. It's a large part of my therapy. In many ways it's my best friend; so often I wake up in the middle of the night excited to have coffee with my morning friend - writing.

But to be truthful, sometimes writing - that friendship - it IS difficult. Because many days I am writing about the most difficult parts of me. That has certainly been the case as I write the final chapters of my life story.

Writing about the hard things I've experienced.

Writing about my failures and endless flaws.

Writing about my fears.

Writing about the truth that life almost always feels more like a fight than a journey to me.

But I had coffee with a friend yesterday morning and I was reminded that's what best friends share - the hardest experiences, the failures and endless flaws.

The fears and the fights.

I have come to know this about my writing without any doubt: God gave me this gift. A gift not for me so much as a gift for others. Because God has given me the wisdom to so deeply understand the depths of my own struggles and pains, and the capacity to express them in ways others understand, it blesses me with the chance to let so many others know - I do truly understand your fights in life.

Many can not read what I write without feeling themselves within my words. To any degree that is healing or inspiring to others brings great healing to me.

I have been asked many times if I find healing in writing because it allows me to release my pain. The truth is, I have pains that I accept will never ever go away. Many of us do. But I've come to believe God is far more interested in USING my pain than RELIEVING it. And I haven't always been able to say it, but I can now; I love God for that.

God watched his son suffer in pain on the cross.

Because God's a fan of pain?

No.

I think it's because God needed us all to understand as clearly as possible that what people long for most in life is someone who can see beneath all that hides their pains, and into the hearts and souls so overwhelmed by them.

When Jesus says he understands our pain, because of the pain of the cross we have no reason to doubt him. And we have no reason to not find comfort in his understanding.

I am glad I don't have to suffer on a cross to say I see you all. I am thankful that God has given me another avenue to express that to you.

I am thankful that so many of you have given me purpose in my pain, for in that purpose, there is healing. Because as Pastor Larry Brey says, "Healing isn't the absence of pain, it's the presence of purpose."

It's something any of us struggling to heal might want to explore. Am I not healing because I'm waiting for the pain to go away? Am I not healing because I've come to believe there can't possibly be any purpose to this pain?

​There’s a line in the song Come Out of Hiding by Steffany Gretzinger:

“And oh as you run, what hindered love will only become part of the story.”

They are words that speak to me. Because most of my life I’ve seen the things that hinder love as the problem - the fears, the mistakes, the detours, the unhealed parts that left me feeling unlovable. Unable, even, to love.

I used to think love could only begin once I got all that right. And maybe I'm still prone to thinking that way.

But it's possible I don't give love enough credit. Maybe love is far more patient and creative than that. Maybe love isn’t waiting on the other side of our healing but quietly working miracles and magic through the parts we thought disqualified us.

Maybe what feels like running from love might actually be the long, winding path of running TO it. We just don’t know it at the time. The fears that make us hide, the heartbreaks that make us cautious, even the failures that make us ashamed - maybe those are all the very things that prepare our hearts to finally recognize love when it arrives.

Because I confess, I have wondered at times - would I even recognize love if it was in front of me?

I am growing to believe that love doesn’t erase our story; it redeems it. Maybe it takes what hindered and even destroyed and weaves it into what heals, a healing that makes love suddenly recognizable. Like magic.

I can see a bit of that in my own story now. The seasons I once labeled wasted weren’t wasted at all. They were classrooms where I learned empathy. The relationships that broke me open didn’t break me apart, they broke me open, like a long awaited doorway.

With some measure of hope, I am wondering if the things I thought stood in the way were actually SHOWING me the way.

Love doesn’t wait for us to be perfect. It meets us in our running, in our confusion, in our learning. And somehow, by the time we finally stop running, love has already turned every hindrance into part of a story worth telling.

Life gets beautiful there, I believe, in this place of I have a story worth telling....

​Much of my professional and personal life is centered on resilience. I often say I'm not as big a fan of the word resilience as I am the character trait resilience. Mainly because the word itself comes with a lot of definitions that at times aren't helpful to one's becoming resilient.

We often think of resilience as an act of will. As something we do -tighten our grip, toughen our skin, stand back up when life knocks us down. And sure, there’s a kind of courage in that. There’s honor in standing tall when the wind is fierce.

But maybe we’ve mistaken half the story of resilience for the whole thing.

Because my resilience journey has taught me some of the most resilient moments of my life weren’t the ones where I stood firm, but the ones where I finally stopped fighting. When I stopped trying to control what was breaking and let myself break. When I stopped demanding transformation on my terms and allowed transformation to simply have its way with me.

Dr. John Price said recently on the Rich Roll Podcast that the psyche is a self-healing organism. I love that. He said there are measurable and immeasurable currents at work within us - forces that, if we stop resisting, carry us toward healing and transformation.

He compared it to the old AA phrase, “let go and let God.”

That struck me because so much of what we call “resilience” today is really our resistance to those very currents. We push against life’s natural flow, insisting we know better than the river where it should go. We armor up, convinced that survival depends on control, but often what we call strength is just a slower form of drowning.

Maybe resilience isn’t about how hard we hold on but about how willingly we can let go.

Let go of the need to hold a marriage together just to look strong.

Let go of alcohol even when you have no idea where strength without it will come from.

Let go of the grief of that broken relationship that once felt required and let it make space for love again.

Let go of the hurtful narratives from the past that feel like self-protection and choose not to let bitterness any longer lead the way.

Maybe true resilience is less about muscle and more about momentum - our willingness to move with pain instead of against it. To accept pain without trying to outthink it. To trust that transformation often has its own agenda that has little interest in our own agenda.

There’s a reason Jesus said, “Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Maybe he was describing this very thing, the idea that the life we’re desperate to hold together often begins to heal when we finally surrender it.

I’ve spent years trying to become stronger, wiser, tougher, more disciplined. And yet, the moments that have truly changed me weren’t when I conquered something, they were when I finally let something go. When I let the storm have its say. When I stopped forcing my way through the pain and started listening to what the pain was trying to say back.

Because that’s where healing lives.

In the letting go.

In the trust that the current usually knows the way home better than I do.

Maybe resilience was never something I had to build, but something I had to stop interrupting.

​Yesterday was the Georgia Jewel Trail Race. The 10th Anniversary. I wasn't there, but I have been there before.

I have been there before and had my life changed because of it.

The memories of the change pop up this weekend every year. Always the same message. Always right on time. And the message, it is hard to see what's next when you have a death grip on what was.

Back in 2018, my first trip to the Jewel, I attempted to run the 35-mile Georgia Jewel. I quit about halfway through the race. I'd spent six months playing up how important the race was to me, how prepared I was for it, and how God was going to help me move every mountain that tried to stop me.

And yet, the mountains were too mountainous that day. Either God or I showed up too small that day.

I don't think it was God....

Coming up short on race day ended up being the least of my worries - at least when it came to running. For months after, I beat myself up for not finishing.

I felt like I'd let myself down. I felt like I disappointed a lot of people who'd supported me. So, for the longest time, having a bad run in Georgia made it impossible for me to have a good run anywhere else.

But that is the story of my life, really. Letting the years behind me blind me to the possibility to be found in the years ahead of me. I have always been prone to letting yesterday have a stronger influence in my life than today and tomorrow.

For the longest time after that 2018 Georgia Jewel race, when I tried to run, no matter where I was trying to pull off that run, no matter how many weeks and months had passed since that race, I was still in Georgia.

Still haunted by Georgia.

I couldn't move forward with what was next in running because I had a death grip on thoughts of quitting that Georgia Jewel.

I think we all want to be ready to tackle what's next; we're truly at our best when we are. Sometimes we'll even stand in the doorway and shout across the prairie of what is next: "here I come." But often, as we shout bravely into tomorrow, we hold onto yesterday and all its fear and shame and guilt.

We really WANT to walk out that door to what's next. We SAY we will. But we just can't let go. We have a death grip on what was.

We have death grips on our childhoods.

We have death grips on failed relationships.

We have death grips on failed business opportunities.

We have death grips on habits or addictions.

You know, the natural rhythm of life is 'next'. The earth keeps revolving, the clock keeps spinning, the calendar keeps flipping forward, the next season keeps coming. Life is constantly marching toward next.

Maybe our most toxic fight in life is our fight against that natural rhythm.

The flow of life is downstream. Too many times I find myself clinging to a branch in the middle of that stream - the 'what was' branch - I find myself clinging with a death grip.

If you find yourself there today, picture it. Picture your death grip on that branch. Feel how tightly you are clinging to it. And then, THEN - picture yourself letting go of it. Feel the freedom as you flow downstream into what's next.

4 years ago yesterday, three years after I quit that first Georgia Jewel race, I went back and finished that race. Crossing that finish line felt like letting go of that branch.

As the image of that 2021 finish line pops up this morning, I find myself needing that finish line reminder as much as I've ever needed it. The reminder that pieces of yesterday are always going to show up wanting to steal any hope we might think about trying to find in tomorrow.

Life always seems to be trying to convince me that my life is finished. It feels like that has always been the loudest and most unshakable voice in my world.

Yet, I find a way to keep seeing finish lines up ahead.

I find a way to keep chasing them.

And so maybe life isn't as much about letting go of the branch as it is staying committed to reaching for the next one in front of you. To keep seeing and believing in that next one in front of you.

I will be forever grateful to the Georgia Jewel. Maybe more than any person or experience in life, that race taught me - keep reaching for that next branch.

And it's given me the chance to say to you: keep reaching for that next branch. And if you're struggling to see it, well maybe that's because you have a death grip on one behind you.