When people hear I moved 2500 miles across the U.S. and left everything behind to follow a clear call from the Lord to pioneer a new thing I often replied back with, I don’t think I could do that. I like to say, “me either. But God made a way with every faith step.”

When people hear of getting up early to pray they tell me, I just can’t do that. I don’t know how to pray. I like to say, “me either, I learned by practicing and throwing myself in the deep end.”

And when I stand on the beaches in prayer tents offering to pray for strangers and share the gospel people reply back, “that’s not my gifting… I could never.” I giggle and say, “same! Until I stood there and tried.”

When I hear of marathon runners or triathletes I often mumble to myself, “ugh I could never do that. That sounds miserable.”

Because I haven’t trained for it.

Comparing my huffing and puffing one miler to a 26.2 marathoner, yea it does feel impossible.

But bridging the gap between a first mile and 26.2 mile is the art of training, discipline, and fixing your eyes on the goal- finishing to win the prize!

I think it’s time we take the “I could never, it’s not for me, I am not called” language out of our vocabulary and replace it with obedience, training, and learning to run the race to win the prize! We are doing ourselves no favors when we expect ourselves to be marathoners when we haven’t been training. Plus we have Holy Spirit moving and working in ALL our weaknesses. We can’t lose in our training/trying!

Christ’s love compels us to train and discipline our lives so we can be radically obedient to however Jesus leads.

It’s time to reframe our training. How do we get better at praying in a corporate gathering— step out and pray. How do we share the gospel better? Step out and obey the Holy Spirit to whom he leads. We train, train, train. Training hurts and pushes us outside our comfort zone but that’s how we grow and open our lives to Holy Spirit miracles. It’s not even about us, it’s our availability.

I believe God has a unique and wild ride ahead for us, but it’s in all the ways we never expected or maybe never even wanted.