My Healer.

So 3 years ago I sustained what I thought would be a life-changing injury: I tore my ACL. One painful surgery later and I was on crutches wondering if I would ever be able to move around the way I was had been able to. You have to understand that as someone whose identity was built on my athletic abilities and not on who I was in Christ, my inability to participate in any kind of sporting activities was a huge blow to my life.

Even though I was told that I would make a full (long) recovery, my knee was still not responding well to physical activity. And by not responding well I mean that after any sort of physical exertion my knee would swell up beyond recognition and I would hobble around on a limp for the next few days. I was completely devastated. I had had people lay hands on me asking God for healing. I had laid hands on myself asking the Lord for a miracle. Nothing was seeming to improve and I was beginning to just accept the fact that I would be broken for the rest of my life.

One funny thing about college is that people run for fun and it's a great way to just meet people. I was getting frustrated because after every run, my knee would be sore for at least 2 weeks and so it was difficult to build up any sort of endurance when you are only running every 2 weeks at best. So running became one of those things that I desperately wanted to do but resolved that it wouldn't be a reality anytime soon.

For SOME strange reason, this year the Lord put it on my heart to give running another try. I don't know if I believed that anything would be different but I figured that I would give it one last go. I went on a run during the second week of January with some friends from church who had started training for a 15k. We did about 3.5 miles that night and I was nervous to see how my knee would do the next day. It was pretty painful actually but I decided that I would go again the next day to see if the pain got worse. It didn't! But I decided to give it a little rest and then see how it felt to run on the next week. Long story short, God has healed my knee. Where I used to not be able to run more than two miles at best, he has continued to saturate me with endurance and push me further than I ever thought I could go. So now, I am training for my first ever 15k and running anywhere from 15-20 miles a week.

It has been so incredible to see God's faithfulness to not only heal my knee, but to also grant me my desire to become a runner. With each run I am just so reminded of how our life with the Lord is like a run and how good God is to give us enough endurance for us to run the race that he has called us to.

This year I joined this nike plus website challenge to try to run 211 miles in 2011. Now that I've done the math it appears that I only have to run 3.83 miles a week in order to fulfill that goal...Maybe I should triple it? Wow I never even thought that I would be setting running goals again! To God alone be the glory.