I am a sucker for the Biggest Lower. I mean s-u-c-k-e-r! And this season, seriously, I think I have cried every episode. From the first one with Shay, the largest girl they’ve ever had on campus, to the precious lady who lost her entire family, husband and two children in a car accident. I mean I was doing the UGLY cry that night. And the last two weeks there have been messages that have really hit home with me.

Two weeks ago, I was struggling with some self-doubt. Thinking that there was the possibility that I had been living a season of my life more in performance mode, than living out of my heart. That genuine place of loving life, taking it in and experience all that God had in it. That maybe I hadn’t been doing that at all, but had fallen back into a place of performance.

So, I’m laying in bed, catching up with the Biggest Loser gang and they are asked to run a mile. The very same thing they had been asked to do on the first episode, when most of them got winded walking ten feet. But now they were different. They’re bodies had changed, they were stronger, more fit. And one of them said, “Well, the I may not be what I want to be, but I can sure do a lot better with this mile then I could when I got here.”

And when she said that I had my own epiphany. It wasn’t that I had fallen back into old patterns of behavior. It was that I was simply discovering something new about myself that needed to change. And I thought, boy we get trapped in that place so often, where the enemy of our soul has convinced us that we haven’t changed. That all the progress we’ve made has been for nothing, because we’re still as pitiful as we used to be. But what it actually is like, is when we get closer to a magnifying mirror we see more imperfections.

God is the magnifying mirror. And as we draw closer to him we see more of our stuff. It’s not that we’re back into our old stuff. We’re getting closer to Him! And when you get closer to One so indescribably holy, you come to a realization of how unholy you are.

So, not sure what mile you’re being called to run today, but want to encourage you not to let that old defeatist mentality get a hold of you. Because, if I’m was a betting girl, and I do love Vegas, I would be that you are actually doing things much better than you used to. So, buck up. Run that mile. And pretty soon we’ll be running two.