Finding Momentum

Last night I lost my keys some­where between Berke­ley and Fre­mont BART station.

To this hour I have no idea where they are. I stood out there on the Fre­mont ter­mi­nal for a good fif­teen min­utes emp­ty­ing my back­pack, pat­ting my pock­ets for those elu­sive keys. I ended up call­ing my Dad (at 12:30AM) to pick me up from the BART sta­tion. When he arrived I kept apol­o­giz­ing. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, “it’s small stuff.”

I tried my best to not think about it. Didn’t work. I tried to pray and let it go. Kinda helped (I think God just told me “You’ve got con­trol issues, son”). But I my brain was run­ning a mil­lion miles an hour as I was dri­ving back from the BART (and if you know me, I was dri­ving 55MPH in the slow lane).

I woke up today and felt like a loser.

Like I can’t describe it. I just woke up and felt low. I woke up and sud­denly I heard sub­tle voices telling me I was an idiot. I should have been more care­ful. I can’t keep things in order. I’m scatterbrained.

I couldn’t shake ‘em. They fol­lowed me to work, where I tried in vain to fin­ish a pre­sen­ta­tion that I only got half-done before I had to run out to a doctor’s appointment.

They stuck with me as I waited an hour in the wait­ing room and slept with my feet all over a Brio train set and other assorted kids’ toys.

They were there when I noti­fied the recep­tion­ist I needed to leave–I couldn’t wait any longer (I had to get back to work and present), and drove back to the office, feel­ing even lower.

I man­aged a less-than-stellar pre­sen­ta­tion. If I could describe it, it would be “apolo­getic” and “lack­lus­ter.” It was a long walk back to my office.

–

It’s days like these that the fight for joy becomes the very last thing you want to do. It takes too much energy, mang. It requires a heck of a lot less energy to wal­low in a pity party. It’s times like these you just want to say “well today sucked” throw in the towel and call it a Ter­ri­ble, Hor­ri­ble, No-Good Very Bad Day.

I had to get out of this funk though. This neg­a­tive energy was sap­ping me. So I went to the gym and ran.

And ran. And ran. And lis­tened to a ser­mon as I was run­ning, where the pas­tor was talk­ing about how Jesus was worth it and his tone of voice told you he believed it with every last fiber in his being and you could hear the warmth and love that this man had for his com­mu­nity. And then I was reread­ing my jour­nal (yes, this is whilst mounted on an ellip­ti­cal machine)  and I thought about a liv­ing hope in every cir­cum­stance. And I thought about run­ning the race with endurance.

Yeah, today was rough, but each stride was good for my soul.