The Marathon

If you’ve been tuning into this blog, you know that I’ve been hosting an online version of Beth Moore’s Bible study, Living Beyond Yourself. We’re now in Week Eight of the ten-week session and I feel like we’ve been in a marathon, one we were not necessarily fully prepared for, and we’re limping our way toward the finish line.

In a good way, of course.

This Bible study is ambitious, to say the least. It has included 30-45 minutes of intensive Bible study and soul searching, five days a week. For just about all of us, that has been a LOT of Bible reading. And as seems to always be the case when I commit to a Bible study, my life circumstances have radically changed while I’ve been doing it. An amazing job opportunity dropped into my lap (don’t worry, you’ll find out allllll about it later this week). I took it. And I’m now in the process realigning my life to make it all work.

So yeah. I’ve gotten a tiny bit behind.

Ordinarily, this would have caused me a tremendous amount of consternation and guilt. I would have felt like I let down those of you who’ve been religiously (heh) doing the reading each week. But I’ve been blessed to do this with a group of women in the very same boat. Some of you have gotten behind as well. Some of you have opted not to do the homework at all, and instead just watch the videos. Some of you have had life-changing events occur and put the study aside altogether, to be picked up at another time.

And the thing is, all of that is totally okay.

I have loved that each week of the study, in and of itself, has contained amazing nuggets of wisdom– wisdom that in some cases I know with certainty will change my life forever. (That “peacemaking” vs. “peacekeeping” thing, for example? PURE GOLD.) Whether you’ve done one week or eight, whether you’ve watched two videos or even just read my blog posts about the study, I feel like everyone who has participated in any way has benefited.

And that’s enough for me.

I look at my last eight weeks, and while the timing of the Bible study seems problematic given all that’s been going on, in all honesty it couldn’t have been more perfect. My husband has been doing the study with me and it has really strengthened our marriage at a time when we needed a lift. The soul-searching the study requires has been tough, but as a result, my focus is where it should be right now. I know who I am and why I’m here. My priorities are in order. I am ready to take on this new job and to do it well. Really well. I know that I would not be in this place mentally right now if it weren’t for the time I’ve taken to devote to this study.

I trust that those of you who’ve participated in any way have experienced some of the same kinds of benefits. Actually, I know you have. I’ve been reading your comments, e-mails and Facebook postings and gotten to see some amazing epiphanies.

This particular week’s session was on faith. I want to write about the topic in more detail but to be honest, I need a little more time to process it. There are some things that have been on my mind lately that I want to write about here, but it’s somewhat controversial, and I want to make sure I do it in the right way.

In the meantime, thanks for hanging in there with me. We’re about to cross the finish line and it makes me laugh imagining what some of us figuratively look like right now!

Want to check out Beth Moore’s Living Beyond Yourself Bible study? Get the details here. You can do it online, on your own, any time you like and I think you’ll get a lot out of it.

Image via jayneandd/Flickr