stumbles and falls

If I had never taken a very wrong turn, I would have never known I could do it.

That thought persisted through my head during the last 10 minutes of my run today.. namely because it was still in the high 80s and I had accidentally taken a rather lengthy detour pre-homestretch.. causing me to run for 10 more minutes than I had anticipated.

But I did it :)

Those extra 10 minutes (my penitential suffering for getting overly-confident about knowing my way around....) gave me time to think. And think. And I realized that a lot of my greatest growth has come out of trying to get home after a wrong turn or two. Some turns blatantly wrong, others just the result of a few hazy road signs and a lack of discernment. Thank you, original sin.

I used to think that faith was literally one path. If you got off the path, the goal would be to retrace your steps to get back on board. I've begun to realize that backpeddling ends up taking us father away, though... we end up going against a lot of traffic and never really seeing anything new. I'm starting to realize that maybe -- just maybe -- imperfection is part of the path. Maybe we can get closer to God by traveling along a hypotenuse or two. Maybe it's on those paths that we see the most, grow the most.

Maybe, because we're all sinners, the non-ideal, with the touch of grace, can be sanctified.

Ideally, we'd never get off the home stretch. At the same time, though -- we're fallible creatures. Redemption is part of the process. God meets us on those side roads and guides us back. Not backwards, just back. We can't undo. He meets us where we are.

And today, on that ridiculous run (I hate running when I haven't gone for awhile -- today was one of those days), I began to appreciate redemption.

I just kept thinking about where I am now, and how things have changed so much over the past few years. Lots of paths, lots of mistakes... lots of detours, lots of heartbreaks. Yes, I wish I had that saintly-pure perspective of faith and God and heaven... but in all of my wandering and all of my change, I've seen faith from a lot of different angles. I'm so thankful for the experiences along the way.

I would have never seen a few of those beautiful houses today without that detour. Nor would I have thought I could run that far on my first day off of a cold-stretch. But I did, and I did.

I would have never met my kids without those detours. I would have never grown in my relationship with my family. I would have never met Cory. But I did, I did, I did. And I am so blessed as a result.

So thank God for detours. :)