Run your race.

I remember when I was in middle school my parents signed me up one summer for a “strength and endurance summer camp”. I’ve loved sports and fitness my whole life, but anyone who knows me knows if I’m not fully emotionally invested or interested, it’s not happening. Which is probably why, in-between puking on the Broad Run track (you try running for hours outside in July), and learning every single thing from 400s to batons to hurdles, I focused on those faded, white, staggered starting lines.

Those staggered lines keep everything so perfectly fair. Same steps, same distance, same track… everyone is equal for the race ahead when they stand at their personal starting line.

Ha, so unlike the world. The world more so gives us a straight line of starting lines on an incredibly bent, wild, twisting, tough track. Some lanes have hurdles, some have multiple baton trade offs, some have unsmooth lanes full of holes and dangerous rocks, some are steadily uphill, some are slippery, you get the point.  So many obstacles, challenges, setbacks. So many things to make us weak. So many reasons to make us feel incapable and unable.

Which lane are you in? Regardless of where you, your life, or your faith is in this exact moment, you know the feeling of a setback. You’ve had them in the past. You’re more than likely dealing with a handful in the present. And unfortunately, the futures got a few unknown ones, too. 

And even though there’s setbacks, your life is not a setback. YOU are not a setback. You are not incapable or unable of completing your race and finishing strong.

Ruth had everything going against her. If there was a competition of challenges stacked against someone, she had it. She was a woman. She lived in a town the Israelites couldn’t stand surrounded by people they looked down upon. She was discriminated against. Her husband had died. She was a widow. She had no children. She was a foreigner. She moved away from her immediate family. Ruth knew pain. She had all the stereotypical reasons to quit the race. Give up the fight. Sit on the sidelines, be quiet, and out of the way. How, with so many hurdles, could God use her life? 

Broken, widowed, poor.. but faithful. So, so very faithful. She clung to her faith and she clung to her God. Even when all the hurdles were stacked in her lane, her life wasn’t over. Her story wasn’t silenced. 

Because where we are weak, He is strong. The things that set us back, are His tools to bless others. The things we see as shortcomings, He uses for good. The trials we face and fail, He fuels for future potential. The life we live, no matter who, where, or why…. His strength is made perfect in our weaknesses.

“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” 2 Corinthians 2:9-10

No matter who you are… No matter the lane you’re in either by choice or chance…  No matter where you find yourself, your life, your thoughts, your surroundings, your finances, your mistakes, your background.. don’t let your lane determine your faith and your potential through Christ. Those the world sees as the weak ones, the quiet ones, the small ones, the less than ones; the imperfect, unimportant, unimpressive; the inferior, the subordinate, the insignificant… history shows those are the ones that God usually chooses to complete His plan. Run your race.