Quitting the Race
Imagine writing an entire book about how you’ve been running one particular race your entire life and how you were giving it up to follow God. Imagine that you believed that you were on the right racetrack, the one that leads straight to Christ. Doesn’t Paul talk about being in a race in one of his letters? Clearly we’re supposed to be on a racetrack of some kind. Now, imagine running that race well. You have all the wisdom, the knowledge, and the blessings you think you need. You believe you have it figured out, finally. You think you are at a point where you can actually breathe.
Now, imagine someone ripping the racetrack out from underneath your feet leaving you with nothing. It shatters the illusion of running a race or even running a race well. Turns out, the racetrack you found yourself on was built on lies and head knowledge.
What do you do when you wrote the book on giving up the race of what the world says to follow and choosing to follow God, only to find out that you just found a better disguised racetrack and you were still chasing after something?
Well, my friends, you sit in the wreckage and you learn the only place to look is up.
I’ve been a Christian for most of my life, except that year-ish I was Mormon, and I spent most of it with the head knowledge of Christ and the illusion that I was giving up control and was dependent on God. In fact, I gave testimonies and stories and even thought I had given up control. I had done programs and listened to sermons and written notes and had done Bible studies. I was doing all the right things. There was no way I only had head knowledge. I could say all the right things to to prove that I was a believer through and through. My life, the circumstances, the battles, all showed me that I believed in a great God. There was no way that I hadn’t fully given myself to Christ.
2020 was an awful year for well (almost)* everybody. Everybody’s world had a shift. Some had big shifts and others had small shifts. For me, 2020 is the year that will mark my life forever. It was the year my entire world changed. It was the year that the racetrack was ripped out from underneath my feet and all I had was the shattered remains of the life I thought I built with someone. The pandemic and the world shutting down were the easy parts for me. Everything I had taken for granted had been shifted and changed in some form (like jobs and school), but then came the plot twist of all plot twists. My marriage wasn’t something I took for granted. It was something that I depended on. It was a rock, a cornerstone in the foundation I thought we built together. Well, my husband ripped away our rock, our foundation. 2020 is the year my husband left me.
Even though he left in October of 2020, there would still be conversations, me begging and pleading for counseling, and more heartbreak on the horizon. The following year would be rough. That’s how long it took me to realize that I couldn’t control anything.
In 2020, I started reading my Bible more and actually studying it. Actually, I shouldn’t say reading it more. In 2020, I started reading my Bible. Before 2020, my Bible reading came in the form of passages in church and the selected passages from Bible studies as we went through other books or materials. I had almost a decade worth of knowledge that told me to depend and trust on God and I thought I was doing that. The knowledge was all given to me through pastors, books, and other christian speakers out in the world. The knowledge wasn’t given to me through my own reading and studying of the Bible.
I thought I was praying for reconciliation and restoration in my home. I thought that I was getting answered prayers in the form of my husband and his empty words. I had done all the things to learn about control and to give up control, but I was quickly learning that there were layers to control and I had barely scratched the surface. I had barely started on the control onion, I had so much more to work through. I wouldn’t figure it out until later (thank you hindsight) but I was running around with head knowledge of Christ. All of my beliefs lived up in the logic of my mind and I thought I could work, argue, logic my way into a relationship with Christ. I was running an insanity cycle just trying to get everything back on track and I didn’t even realize it because I thought I was doing what I was supposed to. I thought I was doing what the Christian should do.
Head knowledge doesn’t make a foundation. Knowing all the things about Jesus and knowing all the buzz words just gave me a Christian-ese thing to grasp onto when I thought times were hard. When the real storms of life hit, when times were really dark, when I felt like I couldn’t breathe, all that knowledge did nothing for me because I couldn’t rationalize how I got there.
I remember thinking about how I had done everything I was supposed to. I remember questioning God wondering why I was always the one who had to get the short end of the stick. I remember feeling crushed that no matter how hard I tried, no matter how hard I worked, no matter how many of the right things I said and did, it didn’t matter. I gave up the race of chasing after the idea of normal, but I threw myself into a new race, the one of the Perfect Christian Girl. I was trying to be the girl saved by grace, the girl who was chasing after Jesus. I was chasing after an idea of what I thought a Christian should look like. If I was the Perfect Christian Girl, maybe I wouldn’t get left behind. Maybe if I was the Perfect Christian Girl, I would be chosen. I would be someone worth knowing and keeping around. These were the beliefs I was running with without even realizing it. It would take my husband leaving, my world imploding, and discovering the racetrack I had convinced myself wasn’t a racetrack to realize I even thought like this.
It was here, in this crumped ruins of a life I thought I had built to perfection, that I realized that the only thing I could do was look up. That’s when I learned true surrender. It would take a year of me still trying to control things. It would take a year of me compromising and trying to bend reality to what I thought was coming down the pipeline. It would take a year of be running around and around in the same insanity circle, surprised when the result wasn’t different than last time.
This is how I know God is kind and gracious. I had all this head knowledge but it didn’t go to waste. In those crumpled remains of my life, when all I could do was look up, that’s when I knew I had to surrender. That’s when I looked up and realized that it wasn’t up to me and my abilities. That’s when I finally gave my heart over to Jesus.
My head knowledge has turned to true conversion and surrender to Christ. God is gracious— he met me where I was, He knew what strongholds I was clinging to and when they were torn down, He was there to help me pick up the pieces.
Letting go and allowing myself to be transformed by Christ (Romans 12:2), fully giving Christ my heart and deciding to live fully for him is the answer. It was the answer I’ve been looking for for years, even though I thought I already figured it out. True conversion to Christ is when the heart change begins. If the past four years have taught me anything it is that the results are best left up to God. Let go and let God, but you have you mean it.
*I add almost because I know a few people that didn’t have much change in their lives during 2020. Some people, a rare few, didn’t have awful experiences with 202o.