800 Meters

   Mayre Lou (or Granny Lou to those of you who know her by that term) and I have spent this week with our oldest grandson. Well, a lot of this week anyway. He was spending the week on Jekyll with the members of his graduating class on a senior trip. Last Wednesday I took him over to Brunswick for a track workout so he could stay ready for a race in Orlando this Saturday. He had already run 5 1/2 miles on Tuesday morning and would run again on Thursday on the beach.

   On Friday we picked him up and drove to Orlando for this particular race. It was a good field and he thought he could set a PR (Personal Record) in the 800 meter event.

   Saturday morning we were up early and over to the track to register and warm up for an approximate 10AM race. The gun sounded and in about 2:00.95 minutes it was over. He missed a PR by about 1.45 seconds. A lot of effort went into the preparation for that one race, as he had been running track workouts all spring, even after his track team had finished their season.

   He is a dedicated runner, running all year round, running on weekends, in good weather and bad, to try to improve his performance.

   This race today is not the end. He will run a couple more times in meets before summer, as he prepares to run in college in the fall.

   It just struck me, as I thought about all he does to prepare, that it is a big effort to prepare for an event that takes 2 minutes to run. In the great scheme of things, 2 minutes is not a long time.

   I spend a lot of time, and have more so in the past, in planning for my family's future. In the light of eternity, the life I live now will only be a dot on the lifeline of the universe but I tend to live as if my life here is the only thing out there. Little thought is given to the eternity that extends to infinity.

   I need to keep my life in perspective, living so as to keeping the reality of eternal things up front instead of using the back burner so much.

   Thanks, Sawyer, for a lesson I needed to think about, and thank you God for reminding me of its truth.