Over the hills...and far away

So, yeah here I am going up one of the many hills I suffered through on the RIDE:WELL TOUR. I won't kid you, those hills were hard for me. Each and every one of them from beginning to end. Some were quite memorable even now, weeks after the end of the ride. I would always sink a bit when I looked up ahead and saw the road abruptly rise up from the flat stretch I was on. However, no matter how hard the trip to the top was there was something I got into the habit of doing. I would stop and turn around and look at where I had just came from. Sometimes I think a lot about where I have come from both literally and figuratively. Sometimes I would think about this road that the bike ride was taking as a "road to redemption". I would always remind myself of how hard and always imposing that hill/mountain/obstacle initially looked and now here I was at the top. I remember giving someone on the team the advice " Don't be moved by what you see...". I think God is reminding us of that all the time. We can so easily be deceived by our senses. I think God wants us to stop and look around when we get to the top of those "hills" that seemed so impossible to surmount. I also think He wants to look back at where we came from to get there. I think He wants us to be joyous and revel in accomplishing hard things. We too often live the ordinary and accept the impossibilities in our lives and are satisfied with that. I know that there is a whole world out there beyond what I believe is possible in my own abilities. This is where God likes to operate in our lives. This is the place where God says " It's Me in you doing this thing....". In the place where the seemingly impossible is commonplace. So each and every hill was an opportunity for God to show me over and over that what I believed to be impossible or at least difficult was just Him telling me my weakness was ok. And this ever present awareness of my weakness just continuously emphasized the strength of God on this bike ride. This is the paradox of what we perceive as a character defect, weakness, to be a valuable tool for God to take us places we would never imagine. It is in these places that we hear the voice of God encouraging us to come closer to Him, be still and understand weakness is ok. That was and still is a hard thing for me sometimes but I am working on it......