Thinking Out Loud, Volume CCCLXVIII

I promise I don't have an obsession with mirrors, even though several times in the past few weeks I've mentioned them and the need for us to stand in front of one and take a good look at the image we see. Today I'm doing it again. Before we do that, however, let's take a trip back in our memory to about fifteen or twenty years ago, and let's try to recall the image of ourselves that we had pictured of the person that we would be today. Now let's go to the mirror and take a look. How does the person you see stack up with the person you had planned to be at this stage of life? I went through this process more than twelve years ago, and I didn't like what I saw. "Who are YOU? I don't know you." That was my first reaction as I stood there looking at the man staring back at me. The neat thing about looking into a mirror is if you take your time and really look, you can observe much more of the person looking back at you than you can of the typical man on the street. You can see inside him and read his thoughts. That's what I did that morning back in August, 2000. I didn't like the image I saw, the part that everyone else could see, but neither did I like the other part, the part that others could not see. The man I saw didn't even bear a slight resemblance to the man I had planned on being at that point in my life. What I was witnessing were the results of a decade of living a life without discipline. My physical appearance, my health, my finances, and my spiritual condition were all suffering from ten years of trying to live "the good life," but my idea of what"the good life" really means was all out of whack. You don't have the time to sit here and read all the details of just what type person I had become, so let me just tell you that I was disgusted with what I saw, both the visible and the invisible. Let me also tell you that I decided right there and then to do something about it. Those feelings of disgust are still fresh in my mind, even after more than a dozen years, and today, every day, I tell myself that I will never allow myself to become that person again. I am also a living testimony that a person can change if he makes up his mind to do so. I don't mean to imply that I had become a bad person...it's just that I had to learn from experience that going down Easy Street will bring me to a dead end. As painful as they were, those few minutes in front of that mirror turned out to be some of the best minutes of my life, because they got my attention and gave me the resolve to turn around. So where am I now? Well, since then, that big, disgusted guy in the mirror has run thirteen full marathons (26.2 miles), at least fifteen half marathons (13.1 miles), I have no debt other than my home and my car, and I feel closer to God than I ever have. Yes, I changed! And if I did it, anyone can. Preston