Random thoughts bounce around in my head when I am running. The other day on my run I was thinking about evangelism. I decided that evangelizing is wrong. It took me awhile to reach this conclusion and it is a surprising conclusion for me. I have always been an evangelist, most of my life. Not in the Christian sense (though there was some of that at one point). I have always been the kind of person who likes to get on her soapbox and expound on how wonderful something is and try to get people to like whatever it is that I like. If I like it then, of course, everyone else should like it, too! Because it is awesome!
It kind of hit me that this is wrong. Really wrong.
I think I realized this because while I was running I was thinking about how much I love running. I absolutely love it more than almost anything else. I love the way I feel when I do it. I love the way it makes me feel afterward. I love the state of mind it puts me in. It is one of those things I could totally and completely evangelize because I love it and it works for me. And I am tempted to do just that. But it would be wrong for me to do that. Because, while it works for me and I love it, it doesn’t work for everyone. Some people hate it. And that’s OK! They shouldn’t run. They should find something THEY love to do and go out and do it. Life is too short to spend it doing something that you hate.
It’s like this with everything, really. Life is not one-size-fits-all. Everyone is on their own journey. The process is all about finding those things that work for you. That make you grow. What makes me grow is not going to make you grow. What makes you grow is not going to, necessarily, make me grow. While I love to hear people talk about the things that make them stoked, I don’t like being convinced that I should do those things. You tell me about what makes you stoked and I will decide for myself if I will try your thing, too. If you show a lot of honest passion for whatever it is, all the better.
I can’t believe it took me 43 years to figure this out.
