when we are not competing

I go to the gym and almost start to cry. There is a row of treadmills and a row of elliptical machines, pristine from the spray-and-wipe-down routine religiously followed by most of the gym-goers. I don't know where to start, and so I choose an elliptical machine, a familiar one, and I plug in my headphones.But I can't shake this worry that starts after about minute 3 that the soccer girls next to me are much better at this. I can't shake the worry that the woman to my left is decidedly unimpressed with the level I put my resistance at and that she is better because hers is over 30 and mine is just 22. I keep my eyes fixed on the orange blinking lights, minute by minute, and amid the shouts of encouragement from the first string center forward to the striker who are running faster than I will probably ever run in my life, I start to calculate it - more loved based on calories burned or miles run, better person, more virtuous version of herself, actually excellent, more good and beautiful than me.A little while ago I read this post from the lovely woman over at Scissortail Silk, about we aren't each other's competition, not one more standard to measure against in this already overmeasured world.And I am fired up and I start this post, my blog says, at the end of March. I think, we are not competing, and I wanted to write and say it out loud, that we, the bakers and butchers and lawyers and authors and midwives, we are all in the ragged band of beautiful making our way towards heaven.We are all, I want to tell you, the raw art, the rare creation. We are all, not in the diluted universals we always use, but in the particular concentration of mitochondrial DNA and endless cells recombining and holding us together, in the concentrated, intense, fiercest way - we are all and each the uniqueness we cannot fathom.I wanted to say this when I first read those true words - we are not each other's competition - but somewhere I lost the message. I went out into the world thinking I had the voice of a prophet and I still preached a fear of the bathroom scale. I still proclaimed scarcity.It can be hard to remember that the work of becoming well is a series of hills you fall down, and the falling and rising, they live together. And so I marched out in March thinking I could wear the banner of the not-competition, and it is May, and I am still sewing the pieces together.But here is what I know, what I preach next to you, in my nervous ponytail making our way through the jungle of the kingdom of God:God is too particular about us to compare.God is too intent on us, on the molecules of being, on how we move and lie down and arise, to watch the numbers at the gym and mark us in a rank of better to worse, against each other.If it is true that God wrestled with Jacob, if it is true that Jesus appeared to Mary and called her name, Mary, like that, each syllable resounding with news of the resurrection and life -then we cannot be competing.Because as Jesus calls her Mary, so Jesus calls me Hilary. So Jesus calls you, calls the striker and the first string center forward, calls the Zumba class ladies and the lawyers and butchers and authors.If God is really wrestling with each of us, our bones pressing against God, our lungs stretched to keep breathing the air that gives the life as we wrestle with the Lifegiver,then we are not competing.We are each the beloved, particular, wrestlers with God.We are each the remarkable made alive again.We are each so singularly loved that God laughs at our comparisons, touches our hip socket with His laughter.And so shall I be delivered.Love,hilary