Everyone has to start somewhere. That’s what they say. Those are words I’ve heard sung like an old song to an old problem. Do you ever feel like you’re stuck at the starting line? Your feet are glued to the ground and no matter how much you muscle your way forward, you make no progress. I stare at my feet, cursing them to move, then my frustration with my own self quickly shifts to whoever made the ground sticky on my slice of the starting line only. It had to be an unfair setback. I was set up, right?
Was it God who decided to hold me back from making my first wide stride? Was he just plucking me up by the collar of my shirt, watching my legs spin in the air for his own amusement? The thought seems absurd, yet I don’t pause my imagination as I shift from yelling at my feet to yelling at my God. How could you keep me stuck here so long when you see I’m fighting with every fiber in my body to move. To go. To take at least one baby step, yet no matter how hard I push, veins jetting from my neck and muscles aching with fatigue, you keep me at the starting line?
You have to start somewhere, they say, offering innocent advice when I feel the wheels that’ve been spinning for so long beginning to rust. Running on fumes, wondering why the full tank never got me where I had intended to go. Like a nightmare of running a maze that ends in mirrors and walls. My heart shakes as if it’s pumped blood for a ten mile run, yet I have nothing to show for it, not even a beautiful landscape view to admire along the way.
And what seems to be worse are the times I find myself waking up to a new starting line each time. Just as I train and plan to step over one, I’m met with another. Is it possible I’ve been lined up at five different starting lines all at once? I’m trying to push forward in my career, but I’m failing. I’m struggling to step into my church family, but I’m let down. I want to make my own family, yet God just won’t let me budge. Can I start a race? Just one? I’m not asking to win, simply desiring to try.
Everyone starts somewhere, but when will I see the finish? When will I be met with the crowd cheering me on either side or the breathtaking water that glistens over a hill, telling me I’m somewhere new. I’m not where I’ve started. I’ve moved. That’s all I crave is to move, just an inch. Let me go.
I think I’m exhausted from starting when I’d like to be tired from running. I wonder, is my energy being wasted? Am I a car running its engine in park, dripping oil in a desolate lot? With all my pleading and seeking God, that just can’t be. He wouldn’t leave me stranded, using my breath just to run a wheel like a hamster.
I peel my fingers from the hot pavement and stand up from my takeoff position. The muscles in my calves relax and I feel my lungs gently let go of air. My heart settles, and I look around. My eyes finally stolen from gazing ahead at a finish line I’d never quite seen, and now what I find is life all around. The bare twigs have been blooming beautiful flowers and the grass at my heels is now tall and bright. The friends to my side are smiling and waiting for me to turn and notice their unfailing support. Seasons have been rolling through, morphing into new while shedding the old.
I can take in an entire gulp of air without feeling depleted. Was my focus on the finish line crippling me all along? Perhaps there’s meaning to the start and miracles moving me when I thought it would be my legs, my feet, my steps that took me where I wanted to go.
Traveling with God isn’t like walking a path. It’s not starting at one point to reach another. It’s a line I can’t explain with a math book or map. It’s an unexplainable journey that, I’ll admit, can be excruciatingly frustrating if I think it’s up to my feet to carry me. That’s when the pain arrives, is when I start to think it’s my body doing the propelling.
Moving forward with God doesn’t always leave footprints or a perfect line of scenarios to be defined. Sometimes it’s a mystery how I’ve gotten where I am. What’s possibly worse than sore muscles or a chest gasping for air, is the fact that I’ve moved so far, yet missed the celebrations at the milemarks.
I urge myself to stop and slow down and write prayers down, because my simple mind never fails to miss an answered prayer unless it looks exactly like a finish line. But you see, God doesn’t answer like that. He doesn’t wrap my blessings in checkered lines that signal completion or glitter banners that scream, “you did it.”
His answering is never a finale, at least not until my very end.
