Growing Grit and My First Rodeo

We are on the home stretch of the school year and in the throes of planning and attending graduation events and taking major (as in 4 intense hours per test) AP exams.  OK, that's just Abby with 3 last week and 4 coming up this week and Emma with one this week.  I just completed a Statistics course through a community college, because I am hoping to apply for a graduate program in Speech Pathology that would start next May.  The American Speech and Hearing Association recently listed some extra pre-requisites necessary before starting graduate work in the field.  I awesomely timed my statistics course to happen while Abby has been taking AP Stat, and she was perfectly trained to come running to my side at the computer whenever she heard a grown-up, stressed-out and slightly whiney voice calling her name.

Emma has finished all of her One Act Play competitions for the year and has two more Speech tournaments to go.  Grace finished her "state testing" and has thrived in fourth grade this year.  Three official weeks of school left...

And then glorious summer and everything gets weird.  I can't figure out if we're all ready for what is to come.  I just know that's where we're headed - toward what is to come.  My prayer is that we will jump into the unknown with hope in the One who brought us there and grit to stay the course He directs us toward.

That probably should be on a motivational poster.

And while I hate sounding trite or cheesy, this really is my prayer, and I am so grateful I am dependent on Another who can handle what is ahead.

Which brings me to running...  Stay with me - it makes sense in my head.  There was a time I believed deep down in an unspoken place that the Lord would not lead me into a place that really felt too hard for me; that if I was supposed to be there it would feel like it, even if it was too hard for other people.

I lacked grit.  I maybe had a little, but not very much.  If something felt genuinely too hard for me, my default was (and still is) to look for an escape or at least a way to make it easier, because something must be wrong.  I must be in the wrong place.

Then I started running.  And running was hard; it did NOT feel good.  As I continued to run and moved a little past the "O my gosh, how do people do this?  I CANNOT breathe!" phase, I realized how great it felt to finish something that felt hard the whole way.  I was growing grit.

This is partly why I keep running.  I love it for many reasons, and I am not fast or great at it, but I am keenly aware that I am doing this hard thing and that I keep doing it.
We have been through some difficult things and in some difficult places that I know the Lord led us into and through knowing we would struggle and fail.  I have told people that He hurt my feelings by doing that, and He did, but He has also grown me.  He is growing me in a willingness to try hard things without a promise of them being anything other than hard.  While this is not my default and probably never will be, I keep running and hope my aging joints will allow me to continue to grow grit.

Not much to report about the rodeo really, except that it really was my first one.  Since I'm needing to keep my Texas card I won't say much about not really being a rodeo gal, but it was great fun to be there with Grace for her 4th grade field trip.  And I only grabbed the shoulder of the woman sitting next to me (who I just met) one time when a crazy man fell off and underneath an angry bull and was temporarily smushed against the arena wall.
Mostly I thought it went well with "growing grit," so I threw it in the title.

By the end of this summer, Greg says I will run 9.3 miles around White Rock Lake (because he knows it's a dream of mine).  Last weekend, I got up to 6.2 miles for a training run.  Next Saturday I'm running in a 5K that my mom is also running in - her first official 5k, because she has only taken up running in the last couple of months after recovering from surgery, chemo, and radiation for breast cancer.  That's what I'm working on... hope and grit.