Yesterday morning I went out for a run. To be perfectly honest I was alternating walking for 60 seconds and running for 90, but it sounds so much more impressive to throw out the words “a run”. I downloaded an app called Couch to 5K – a lovely voice interrupts your music to tell you when to run and when to walk and it’s incredibly freeing to not have to look at your watch. Smarty pants Apple people. And it was while running and listening to one of my top 3 classic Amy Grant favourites, 1974, (the other two being If These Walls Could Speak and her 1983 Christmas Album in its entirety), that I realized I have changed. Just a little bit. I come from a church tradition that celebrates moments of change. Date, time and place markers give significance and surety to commitments of faith. It’s not uncommon to hear the phrase “crossed the line of faith”. Clear. Demarcated. One side or the other. Life would be far less complicated if we could approach everything that way. There’s the line of forgiveness. Either your forgive or you don’t. And once you’ve crossed the forgiveness-line, you never slide back into the mental conversations where you always win. Either you are anxious or you aren’t. And once you’ve crossed the anxious-line you never second-guess your decisions. Either you are a gossip or you aren’t. And once you’ve crossed the gossip-line you don’t ever take even the teeniest pleasure in hearing something about that person that you’ve already forgiven and don’t have any anxiety about seeing at Safeway. But life isn’t like that, at least not for me. More often than not change is slow and painful. My friend Tabea once told me that pain is never wasted. That’s comforting and hopeful. For me change is often less momentous and more like the words in 1974… “Slowly we had made quite a change…Somewhere we had crossed a big line…down upon our knees we had tasted holy wine…” and in the process I have grown up. Just a little bit.