Persistence

My two oldest, Isaac and Emma, had track and field days in the last week of school that underscored something I already knew -  Everyone wants to be a talented sprinter.  It is quite an honor, at the primary and intermediate schools, to be among the top three in your class that gets to race that day.  You must place high enough in you preliminary class heats for boys and girls in order to do so, and when you go out to race, the hopes of your whole class rest upon you.  Bragging rights are at stake individually and as a class.  The 400 meter run on the other hand is open to all takers.  This is the longest event they run that day and anyone can enter. So Isaac did.
When the timer said "go" they all took off.  The boys in first and second place jetted out in front of everyone else.  Their lead grew steadily until about the 200 meter mark, and by then it looked like they may not even be catch-able anymore. Isaac hustled along a ways back in third.
Thanks to genetics, Isaac is not big, there were kids in his race that were easily a whole head taller than him.  He planned his race well though, he kept a consistent pace and by the end he was in place to challenge for the win while many others had long since faded.
For the last two weeks now Christi has been in the Phoenix Children's Hospital in a medically induced coma. She was put under to stop a massive seizure that she was having.  In order to get it stopped they had to put her under deep and keep her under a long time.  I remember watching her brain waves on the EEG monitor go from violent spikes to screens and screens of completely flat.  For the last couple days she has begun to wake up.  Her progress has been very slow, and even now she does not move her limbs or extremities on command or even very much at all.  The story and perhaps even our trajectory changed a little this morning when the doctor's did their rounds.  They reported that the levels of sedation medication in her blood were low enough now that they no longer were effecting her behavior. That means there is some other cause.  There are two possibilities that they asked us to consider - first, that what we are witnessing is the extent of her brain damage, or second, that this is still post seizure recovery.  Either one could be long term of even permanent.
While we had know these possibilities from the beginning, we had hoped I suppose for 2 maybe 3 intense weeks and then a gradual slide back into normal noisy, energetic Christi life.  2 to 3 weeks of buoying each other up, 2-3 weeks of tears mixed with seasons of rejoicing, 2-3 weeks of life at this level of intensity would be a good sprint for our faith.  Faith, for me at least, has always been easier in the short term though.  It takes more planning and consistency, more persistence to stay the course for the long haul.
The journey must still be taken a step at a time - manageable short term goals make a big difference - but this type of race isn't run with grit teeth.
Paul said, "Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight,...and let us run with patience the race that is set before us." Any distance runner will tell you that running with patience does not mean running slow.  What it means is pacing yourself - planning for the long haul.  In that way, distance running is more cerebral than sprinting I guess.  In elite races there is an ebb and flow of things.  They always give their all, but in very few cases does someone lead the race from wire to wire.  Every endurance runner must pick their spot and each one can expect to battle at some point with "the beast." This inner battle, and how it is fought, separates champions from the rest of the field.  Paul continues, "let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith."
Not knowing how long this race is would be unbearable under any different author.  He is the finisher though too.  Isaiah wrote, "Has thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary?...He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up on wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint"   -Isaiah 40:28-31
Christi faces the possibility of a tracheotomy if she does not develop a sufficient cough/gag reflex by the end of the week.  The thought of it is hard to bear. She continues to progress though, and today's cough was better and more frequent than yesterday.  Still weak, inconsistent, and not yet half what it should be, but getting better. There is no way that she or we could run this alone.