2017 The Resolution to Be Oneself

This was my New Years Eve post last year. 

How did I do?

Saturday, December 31, 2016

New Years:  Getting Up One More Time

New Years Eve: I have failed at getting to the start of the ironman many times, yet as I listen to the fireworks out there in the night, I yet have hope, and I yet have the will to keep trying. God just won't let me quit, Somehow, I still find it inside to keep training: to keep hoping. I get older and older and fail and fail. Yet, in the end, I somehow still hope. That Hope is more than I could muster on my own. I like that quote: "The miracle is not that I finished but that I had the courage to begin." So this New Years Eve I am thankful and feel blessed that I have been given the courage to begin and begin again and begin again, and again. Tonight I am thankful that God pushed me to simply have the will, the hope, to get up one more time, to have the courage to hope. In the process, doubt and fear had to be dealt with and overcome and all the arguments for mindless moderation must be argued down. To me it sometimes seems that the world would level us off into clones of one another. And if we are not "acting our age," or following some less courageous predetermined pattern, it is as if a violation of the natural order has been committed.

So my resolution is to be myself. To hope where there doesn't seem to be a reason to; to keep getting up to reach for more. Who knows. I might just inspire someone else to step outside the preordained prescription for their lives. You never know who is watching or reading this post; someone waiting for inspiration; waiting to see if I will get up yet one more time than I get knocked down, and finish the "race set before me."

 

So went was my New Years post last year.  I ask myself;  how did I do?   I ask God: How did I do?   The training for Ironman Texas really beat me up.  However, I made it to the starting line for the first time in many, many tries.  I finished the swim and bike but couldn't go on. It was the hardest thing I have ever tried to do.  The support was amazing.  An experience of a lifetime.  Maybe I should quit here, I had thought.   I signed up again: in training now.   How did I do last year?  The answer is in the smile I have at writing this, in the feeling of the "peace with oneself" feeling in my hearth thinking upon last year.  So I didn't do too badly, I guess.  I am still standing, still trying, still dreaming and hoping, getting knocked down and getting back up.  Praise God.