We're THOSE people now

So we walk now. Almost every day. Somewhere between two and ten miles.

How did this happen? How are we these people?

For years, I admired people who walked regularly in the same way I admired people who folded fitted sheets or remembered to mail birthday cards. Lovely people. Mysterious people. Not my people.

Except...apparently they are.

I'm realizing there are a surprising number of things I spent years labeling "not me" that have quietly become me. I underestimated my own capacity to change. I thought personality was mostly fixed, that you just got assigned your quirks and limitations and learned to live around them.

I also thought that if I prayed hard enough, God would simply remove my old habits and replace them with new ones. I was sincere. But I can see now there was a little magical thinking mixed in there, too.

These days, I think relying on God looks less like waiting for God to make me different overnight and more like trusting God to use me to change myself.

God gave me a body that can move. A brain that can learn. The ability to build small systems, repeat them until they become habits, and slowly become someone new. That's grace, too.

So we became walkers the least glamorous way imaginable. We started walking after dinner. We walked on weekend mornings. We kept going when it was inconvenient, hard or boring. One ordinary walk at a time, until one day we  realized:

Oh.

We're walkers now.

Maybe that's how so much of life works. Not usually with fireworks, but with faithful little steps. God provides the strength, and we provide our feet.

And somewhere along the way, almost without noticing, we become the people we always thought we weren't.