life together

Simple thought:

Running is often times my metaphor for life... it is where God often times meets me, teaches me, hangs out with me, and reminds me of things that he has already taught me. The image of running a race as a metaphor for life has been very powerful for me, in teaching me perseverance, patience, training, endurance, silence, honesty, sacrifice, selflessness, and many other things

And yesterday I remembered, once again, that I run better when I run with others.

Apply as you will.

FINE! I'll make you happy!

Three months later, and many dollars shorter but memories richer, I return to the blogosphere. I could apologize for many paragraphs, but we'll just leave it with, "friend, it's good to be back!"

The other night I went running, as I have many nights this summer [reason #951 to love the cooler northern summers]. As I was running through one of the crowded areas of the city, I passed a woman in her mid-twenties, talking on [and when I say talking on, I mean screaming into] her cell phone. I'm not entirely sure what the conversation was about, but I do know that the average conversation soundbite that I can actually catch while running the opposite direction is about 10 seconds. This one, I caught about 30 seconds of due to high volume of said individual and the language in that 30 second soundbite alone would have required a R rating...

So I'm guessing the conversation wasn't necessarily a happy go-lucky one.

At any rate, the one phrase, screamed into the phone, that most caught my ear was this:

"FINE! I'll make you happy. I won't be [...] happy at all but I'll make you [...] happy. I hope you know how [...] miserable this makes me."

Man. What a picture of love. Truly the self-sacrificing martyr that one... chances are high that she will [and by that I mean, will not] receive a metal of honor for that sacrifice...

Yet, as much as I roll my eyes and am shocked by her angry, loud, ugly response [to an unknown prompt, in an unknown situation], I wonder how often my own heart response is very similar...

"FINE! I know it's the right thing to do, so I'll do it, but I'm not going to like it..."
"FINE! I know I need to be talk to her/him, so I'll do it, but I'm going to hate every minute of it."
"FINE! I'll go, because it matters to you, but I'd really rather be anywhere else."

I might not verbalize those things... in fact, given my semi-southern culture, you might never know what's going on inside. But the ugliness is still just as ugly.

May I be as convicted of my own bent-ness, as I am of hers...

Have mercy.