WILD ABANDON

"I believe God made me for a purpose.....when I run I feel His pleasure."  
-Eric Liddell

Yesterday, while running, I was thinking about goals and dreams. I began the thought process just wondering what my goal in running was or should be. 

It then graduated to more life stuff.

Of course, goals are far different from dreams. Goals are math and dreams are art. At least, that's the way I look at it. 

   

What do you want out of running?

That's what I asked myself. Since I am not, nor have I ever been very competitive, my goals are not usually to best someone else, or even myself, I just enjoy it.

So my thoughts went toward further running goals...and to be honest, I couldn't think of anything except that I just want to run. I don't want to run a marathon or improve my time. I just love to run, sometimes slow, sometimes fast.

Then it hit to me: 

I want to run with WILD ABANDON! 

No fancy goals or limits....just doing something that brings me pleasure! It seems that running with "wild abandon" as a purpose turns out to be a DREAM rather than a goal.

It is never too late to be who you might have been.  ~George Eliot 

Well, then my thoughts started in on life. I realized that I quieted my dreams many years ago. I put them away for safekeeping while I was helping others with their dreams, or so I thought. You can never really "help" others with their dreams. The only way you can truly help is by not cutting the wings of your own dreams....like I did.

This is something I wrote about last year and I just this moment re-discovered this same theme.

Psalm 119 says:

And I'll stride freely through wide open spaces
as I look for your truth and your wisdom;
Then I'll tell the world what I find,
speak out boldly in public, unembarrassed.

In my Christian life, I have been conditioned to allow myself to be shackled by many things.
No one person or set of people actually taught this to me...but it has always been implied with this stripe of "Christian" that I wear.

When I first really gave my life to the Lord at 16 years old, in the Jesus people movement, the buzz words of the day were "discipline" "obedience" "submission" "self control"... law, law, law! Looking back, I wonder where the grace was...and what about JOY?


What about striding freely through wide open spaces?!

As a child, I remember running through fields with wild abandon. ...not running towards anything nor away from anything...but just running for the sheer joy of it. What in the world happened to that? In my mind, I can almost FEEL it!

...and I remember, once again, my HAPPY HEART.

My GOAL is to rediscover where I stored my dreams and see if they are still alive...

...and my DREAM is to live my life with wild abandon!

(Great book to read on the subject of Math vs. Art: "The Art of Being You: How to Live as God's Masterpiece" by my friend, Bob Kilpatrick (co-written with his son, Joel Kilpatrick.)