ToeJam VQ
14 PAX showed up to accelerate!
@Tijuana @Soul Glo @Wiggums @Thin Mint @PrimeTime Kwame @MaryAnne @Veronica @Pancreas (Nant’an) @Peewee (TRAPP) @tic tac @Oscar Mayer @taco libre @2Buck and YHC’s VQ @ToeJam
Warmorama
Side straddle hops in cadence
Willy Mays Hays
Good Mornings
Some of these (Quad Stretch)
Pain is temporary, Strava results are forever!
The Thang:
The thing I love about TRAPP is the experience of running through this beautiful park so let’s experience the park!
Everyone runs up and over Sunrise Hill. At the bottom of the other side keep going straight up the next hill to Depot Trail on the right.
Once on the trail take the first right at the fork and follow it until it ends. Turn right at the T junction down past the barn and then run toward the bridge.
Go 20 minutes out and then turn around and come back via any path you choose.
Push yourself to go a little bit farther than you have before.
COT at Sunrise Hill
Announcements
Franklin Convergence coming up on 9/25
2nd F Ping Pong Pepper gathering this Saturday. Check Slack #2ndF channel for details
Patagonia Trip Planning has commenced. Anyone interested check #2ndF channel for more details.
Prayer Requests
Mary Anne – Praise for God’s protection for him and his family on his most recent trip.
Kwame – NC F3 Capt Caveman’s mother passed away from covid – prayers for his family
Continued PAX health issues along with numerous friends and family. A lot of people are struggling right now so let’s be reminded to keep lifting one another up in prayer.
YHC’s M – Complication with pregnancy has brought some concerns which will likely facilitate an early birth and have added a lot more discomfort for my M
Moleskin
I love extraordinary experiences and that’s why this place is special to me. Every time I come up to Sunrise Hill it feels new.
I am renewed and restored in the light of God’s glory and creation. This place points me to the presence of God. I don’t pray in the same ways up here. Sometimes I just stand in awe of the beauty of this place and stay silent. Sometimes I meditate on God and my life and what He wishes to reveal to me. Often when I get alone with Him, that is when I receive inspiration. I’ve been trying to be intentional to make time to get alone with God and it has made a huge impact on me. The books I’ve read recently talk about the importance of rest and how many men in the Bible made time to get alone with the Creator to hear from Him. The hilltop is restorative. I want to stay up here. We climb to the top and we immediately stare at the sunrise and it is awesome.
But if you look around, you might see a slightly different view. We don’t often look thoughtfully downward in all the other directions from the top of this hill.
Down there is where we came from.
That is where we pushed ourselves. That is where we persevered. That is where we accelerated. That is where we got better. Out there is your community. That is where you make an impact on yourselves, your family, your friends, your community.
We often talk about seasons of life and how sometimes we are in plentiful seasons and sometimes we are in tough seasons.
God has been challenging my ideas of that recently. While I believe it’s true that life has a seasonal flow it has caused me to oversimplify what I’m going through and dismiss the nuance of what God is doing every day. When big things have been tough for so long my focus on this “tough” season often bends me toward feelings that maybe my ongoing struggles are unjust. I feel like I’ve been in many back-to-back hard seasons and even now it feels like I’m going through some of the toughest challenges of my life.
About five years ago I lost a job and that sent me and my family into a multi-year season of upheaval and chaos. By God’s grace we’ve emerged from that season in many respects but since then we have struggled with family, community, financial security, and much more. Even in the last year my estrangement from my father/mother/brother, along with the difficulty of this current pregnancy, the challenges of a job that at one point felt incredibly safe and secure; but now feels like one of the most stressful experiences of my life. When I say it all like that it feels like a lot.
And yet, it was that first chaotic season that sparked a huge change in me. It caused me to refocused my efforts and make big changes to my priorities. Those changes made a massive impact on my trajectory.
Additionally, it has been through those subsequent hard seasons that I have spent countless hours working on myself. I worked harder than ever and found a good job that has been a huge blessing. That job allowed us to put our kids through some great schools which my eldest child certainly needed. On top of that, it also caused me to reevaluate how I deal with my emotions and brought about discoveries about myself that were hidden for years. While I have so much more work to do, I’m now more emotionally healthy than I’ve ever been and the benefits from that to my relationship with my M are palpable.
My job, though stressful, has me in a place of responsibility that no one has ever entrusted me with before. And while my relationships with my parents and brother are fractured, I have been more honest and forthright than ever before. I have a peace that I had no knowledge of before.
And to top it all off, I found this group… …and all of you wonderful men. You High Impact Men.
So it isn’t just a tough season or a plentiful season.
It is both.
While this season has been hard, it has also been good.
In the Bible in the book of James, which is my favorite book and just chock full of wisdom, it OPENS with this in verse two:
2 Consider it all joy, my brothers and sisters, when you encounter various trials,
3 knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance.
4 And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.
12 Blessed is a man who perseveres under trial; for once he has been approved, he will receive the crown of life which the Lord has promised to those who love Him.
I need the hilltop experience. Rest is so important and I would encourage all of you to be intentional to discover the hilltops in your life that restore you. The time at the top is what inspires us to find what God has for us while we are down there doing life. Without the hilltop experience, the challenges of this world can jade us and we can become lost. Get alone with God. Stop talking so much. Be still. Listen for His voice. The hilltop takes work. It isn’t easy getting up here. We must seek out our hilltops and then put in the work in order to reap the blessings of rest.
And while the hilltop is necessary, let’s not forget that the work is still down there.
Where I push myself is down there…in the gloom.
That is where I get better as a husband, a father, a friend.
I want to yearn not only for the hilltops but also for the work that molds me into the man I wish to become.
If I can encourage you all in any way it would be to say that no matter where you are, whether hilltop or gloom, keep accelerating.
SYITG! ToeJam Out!