Forward motion isn't the finish line, but it's also not paralysis

​Several years ago I was running a race, the Georgia Jewel. I'd prepared all summer for it. It was going to be my longest run ever, over the most difficult course I'd ever tried to tackle.

My theme song preparing for that race was "Confident" - by Steffany Gretzinger. All summer I clung to these words in that song:

I won't win this battle with the strength in my own hands
You're the mountain-mover and only You can.

A little over halfway through that race it got really hard. It was hot, I felt like I couldn't go on, and I quit. I just sat down in a shaded tent with a cold drink and called it a day.

My friend Greg Armstrong recently told me that quitting is a drug. It's the morphine that instantly makes all the pain we're feeling, all the stress we're encountering, it makes it all go away in an instant.

When he told me that, I thought of the Georgia Jewel. I thought, he is right. In that moment of quitting there was no more pain, no more thinking "17 more miles to go", no more thinking I'll never be able to finish this.

There was just relief.

Like all drugs, though, that quitting morphine has come with a hangover. A powerful and relentless and haunting hangover in the form of a near daily reminder that I got paralyzed by fear. I got paralyzed by not believing forward motion was still possible.

One of my favorite scriptures is 2 Timothy 4:7

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.

I think sometimes, looking at this scripture, we lose sight of how important it is to fight the good fight. The moment that fight gets hard, we start wishing for that "finish the race" moment. And the more we focus on that finish, the further away and impossible it begins to feel. Before long, we convince ourselves we have no fight left.

I think sometimes when we're asking God to help us be mountain movers, we have the end in mind. We just want God to help us get from here to there with the snap of a finger. We picture life on the other side of the mountain and forget about the importance of the battle to get there.

Looking back at that Georgia Jewel race, I think I quit because I was convinced God wasn't going to see me to that finish line. When asking myself if I could go on, I wasn't asking if I had any forward motion left in me, I was asking myself if I could finish the race.

In the aftermath of that race, I've heard God say to me, I don't know why you focused on that finish line. Almost always, you have no idea what the finish line even looks like. But you do know what forward motion looks like. It looks just like that last step you took. It looks like every step you took this summer. It looks like the step you took to line up at the starting line.

You know what the next step looks like. So just take it already.

A few months later, after that race. I ran my furthest race ever. I committed that day to focus on the clear and present battle at hand, and not on the distant finish line I couldn't begin to see.

That day I just said no to the morphine of quitting. That day, I discovered a new drug.

We're all in some challenging times right now. They look different for each of us, but we're all in a challenge. The finish line is starting to sound impossible. We're staring at that mountain - that daggone thing hasn't moved an inch - and we're wondering, where is God?

Well, God hasn't finished his race. He didn't race ahead to the finish line and leave you in his dust (maybe the only runner who has never done that to me). God is there in the battle, he's there in one more step, he's there saying let me teach you about foward motion.

I don't know what forward looks like for you today. I just know it's the opposite of paralyzed. If the devil of quitting is on your left shoulder, the angel of forward motion is screaming on the other one.

Life is hard. It's a battle to figure out. But as long as you're moving forward, you're figuring it out. Forward motion isn't the finish line, sometimes it's a long way from it, but every time it's a whole lot closer to it than paralyzed.