You Run Like a Girl

                I am not a runner.  I have tried to imagine myself as a great marathon runner with endurance and speed.  Imagining is as far as I ever get. 

                The height of my running career was in my eighteenth year.  I met a Cambodian girl who was a cross country runner in my freshman year of college.  One day, she coaxed me into going for a “short run” with her before dinner.    Halfway through our “short run”, I was telling her that I would just “wait for her here” or “I will meet you at the dining hall”.  But, she looked me sternly in the eye and said, “you can’t quit until you see the end.”  So I shuffled on.

                I ran until we ran out of town to a long farm road with nothing around.  We ran to the end of this road and looked around.  It was beautiful.  After being cooped up in an old dorm room, doing hour after hour of studying, it was more than refreshing.  And, I had done it!  Me - the “non-runner”! 

                So, over our large pasta dinner, where everyone else had eaten and gone hours before, she told me how she started running.  She, along with her older brother and parents, escaped Cambodia in the middle of the night from a camp during the Khmer Rouge’s bloody reign.  One of her brothers had died there and her parents would not last long – they were educated, which was deadly.  So, at age ten, she fled for her life and the family ended up in France.  Her family had relatives there, and so her parents gained employment in a hotel.  Several years later, they came to the United States.  In the years shortly following her escape, her parents became Christians. 

                In her high school years, she came face to face with the monster of her past.  She had gone through her own personal hell, and it haunted her.  She wanted to die.  So, she decided to run herself to death.  Day after day she ran longer and harder, but she never died.  She found herself praying and talking with God while she ran.  She also found out that she liked to run.  Running was the catalyst for her healing in both mind and soul.  We keep in touch and she now climbs mountains instead of running marathons. 

                I do not run physically much anymore, but every day I am running in a race.  It might not look pretty – my sin shows.  I may not run like other godly women, but I am praying and talking with Jesus while I run.  I may “run like a girl”, as my children like to say J   It gets harder, but I press on.  I can’t quit until I see the end.                                                                                           Your Fellow Sojourner

                [12] Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. [13] Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, [14] I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

(Philippians 3:12-14 ESV)