Idle and Blessed

I'm in a long term relationship with running, and like any long term relationship, there are seasons of ease and struggle. I've always been fairly certain the key to success in maintaining a long term relationship with running is simple discipline: the grit of a daily grind, where you show up to the work regardless of how interested you feel. I run on the days it feels awful, the days it's hot or I didn't sleep, the days my legs feel like lead, the less than ideal days (which is something like 75% of them), so that I experience the occasional days of bliss. And this is indeed the key; there is no bigger secret to "being a runner," I don't care what anyone says. But what I often don't acknowledge is that grit isn't intrinsically rewarding; for every athlete or artist or doer of hard things there is actually something deeper, something more like: I feel proud of myself when I run every day, and I feel validated as a human when I accomplish something ...

Can it be that in this body lies the image of God? In this body, which churns and stirs and rages and pours Out like spilled water onto the pages of the life I write. Can it be that my hands, which also pour sweat onto the nervously string-bound books Full of dreams I've created in the quiet, Could ever do the work I've seen to do, and fearfully welcomed, like Christ? Can it possibly be that this heart, tripping over itself as it runs toward its last beat, Could be called something resembling the magnificent heart of God? I don't know what it means to incarnate the image of God With blurry eyes and tight hamstrings, The faulty valves in my brain, and the panic that sets in at night. Surely the splitting of my head, the metallic taste of my mouth, the pulsing static visionary-auditory-hallucinatory aura of a migraine Is not what is meant by it. The virus-catching, numb-feeling, tingling, pain Pounding heart, panic attack, escalating dread of what's...