Hope on a treadmill

It's been a rough couple of days. Without going into detail (professional boundaries, and all that sort of thing) it's been the kind of weekend that requires the support of good friends (thanks, guys), and Ben & Jerry's. Luckily, I've had both.

But while the Ben & Jerry's is necessary, it's also a very short term solution to life's problems. It's easy to sit there with your face firmly planted in a pint of Half Baked, consequences be damned, I don't care if I'm downing 1500 calories in one sitting or whether I'll feel sick later.

So the ice cream was only part of my approach. I also went running. That's not a new thing, of course, but that's kind of the point. In the midst of being sad, and physically and emotionally tired, I managed to stick to the marathon training schedule I started in July. This is a low week, schedule-wise, so it was only 3 miles. But still, I found some hope in that half hour on the treadmill.

(OK, it was a little more than half an hour. And it might have been the only time I've ever found hope on a treadmill. There was Great Dismal Swamp smoke outside, you see...)

Running, for me, felt a little bit like Jeremiah buying his field at Anathoth (Jer 32:1-15). The land was under siege, and property values had plummeted. It just wasn't a place you bought land anymore. But Jeremiah did. Buying that field was a way of showing he had faith in what the future would bring: that, as God told him, "houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land."

Things may be a little rough now, but I'm trying to have faith in what the future will bring. And running is a way of doing that. Even a 3 mile run is an investment. It says that in November, no matter what else, I'm going to run a race and I'm going to be proud of myself for it. Fields will be bought again in this land. There's good stuff to come. Let's get started now.