I think I’m doing okay. A lot of April and May weren’t very okay - I think I was very much consumed with work and running. I tend to look to those things to make myself seem more important, but it’s hard work trying to justify yourself by those sorts of means.

I found out I had a stress fracture around March or so. Then I couldn’t stay healthy because I was training pretty foolishly, trying to increase my mileage rapidly in a new pair of shoes while also trying to get back to pre-injury pace. The Rock n Roll full marathon I had been preparing for and had actually been thinking about since last December or so came this past weekend and will be remembered for its ambivalence. I didn’t get much good training in the preceding 12 weeks. I didn’t run a great time. I started struggling at 22, went down due to cramps at 25, and ended up walking much of the last mile. Suzi and Tim and Tina all came to cheer my friend Brian and me on as we ran. That sort of support will always mean a lot to me, even when I don’t get a good time.

Work… well, nothing bad happened at work. It’s just that it’s sometimes so consuming that it becomes detrimental to other things in my life that are more important. It affects the free nights I spend with Suzi, for example, because all I think about is doing a side project or researching some technology. It affects my small group Bible studies, because sometimes I just sit there and think about the code I want to be writing.

Anyway, so all of the last two paragraphs was going on for most of April and May, and it all culminated with a very frustrating Ultimate Frisbee game with all the guys from church, and then I picked up this tiny book - more like an essay - called The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness by Tim Keller, where he talks about how insatiable and desperate our egos are and how we’re just trying to prove to everyone else that we’re “somebody” and even when we do that, the next morning we wake up, and we have to prove it all over again. Keller said it’s like going to court everyday trying to plead your worth and importance… but then he said that we don’t have to go through this and we should consciously leave the court everyday because Jesus already went to court and won righteousness for us.

I read that essay on a Thursday night on the living room floor; two days later, a few of us went to Micah’s wedding on a farm in northern Washington, and the next day, Suzi and I drove to Olympic National Park after church and had a really good time together. We went to Hurricane Ridge, the Hoh Rainforest, and Rialto and Ruby Beach, and we stayed at this cool bed and breakfast in Port Angeles. And it was really therapeutic. It was really good time spent together, just the two of us, and I kept reminding myself that I wasn’t going to go to court to try to defend myself.

And so ever since then, I’m not sure what it’s been, but it’s been a whole lot easier to just treat work like work and running like a hobby and Suzi as my wife and God like my God. In the past, I think I would get things messed up and think of work like God and running like God and Suzi as a roommate and God as a contract, but things have gotten a lot better recently inside my head and my heart, so I’m honestly really happy.

Hmm, other things that happened in the last two months or so:

  • read Crazy Busy by Kevin DeYoung
  • annual church basketball tournament, the Easter Basket (I couldn’t play, due to my foot injury)
  • started messing around with React Native, bought an iOS developer account, got React rendering isomorphically with React-Router on Hapi, launched a site on Heroku that is super buggy and has like no permissions implemented so I’m not even going to link it here
  • women’s appreciation night at church, Oscars themed (James and I were responsible for music during dinner)
  • Suzi arranged a birthday lunch for me at Hawaiian BBQ on the Ave, and we went to ShareTea afterwards, it was a good time
  • Brian and I ran that full marathon and are currently down in Oregon after visiting Crater Lake. This was a really fun trip because we actually didn’t plan much of it. We didn’t do any of that “book hotels in advance” or “come up with an itinerary” stuff, we just sorta left, and we don’t figure out where we’re going to sleep until we start eating dinner. It’s a nice change of pace, because here, we don’t have anywhere to be or need to adhere to a certain schedule. There’s actually no rush or anything.
  • finished Isaiah. fighting to get through Jeremiah. Trying to re-memorize all of the chapters of Romans that I’ve memorized in the past year