From Sundi Jo: This is a guest post by Maria Keckler. She is a writer, speaker and the editor and publisher of Stories from the Vine. She blogs about leading through living, writing, and publishing a phenomenal story at http://mariakeckler.com. Follow her on Twitter. @MariaKeckler. Want to submit your guest post? Click here for the details.

What race have you been called to run?

I was fifteen when Mom uprooted our family from our home in Mexico City to give us a new start, three years after Dad passed away. I was terrified.  I was starting ninth grade and didn’t speak English.  Losing my friends and home didn’t occupy my mind—only the reality that unless I learned English, my dream of one day becoming a teacher and writer would die forever.
Urgency became my middle name.  I started a race against time, and I could not afford to lose any.  It was all up to me — or so I thought.

The race began with admirable determination. Daily I memorized irregular verbs, idiomatic expressions, awkwardly spelled words, and cumbersome sentence structures. My Spanish-English dictionary was my bible.  I read everything in English I could find—cookbooks, gardening books, national geographic, Reader’s Digest….  I read aloud, desperately trying to duplicate the perfect pronunciation of conversations I stored in my mind.
But Improvement wasn’t happening fast enough.  I was a junior in high school and was still required to take special English classes when others were already choosing a college.  As I glanced into my imaginary future, I became anxious and depressed as I tried to gauge how far behind them I would be if I didn’t catch up.
I had become a keen observer of body language, so I caught the eyes rolling impatiently or lips mouthing my defective pronunciation, during mandatory oral presentations, or sighs from sympathetic students, scrunching their foreheads, straining to understand my unintelligible syllables.  And discouragement was quickly devouring my resolve.
Then summer came, and I began looking for a job to help with expenses.
My first interview was my mother’s answer to prayer. It was for a receptionist position at a doctor’s office in Los Angeles.  They wanted someone smart enough to file patient charts with minimal supervision, nice enough to greet patients, and fast enough to type over 55 words per minute.
A perfect fit.  A miracle.  A once in a lifetime opportunity—these were my mother’s words, words she kept repeating during our bus ride back to our apartment.  I could see despair in her expression when I said, “I have to think about it.”
“Don’t you see?” She said. “You can wear pantyhose and dresses and look pretty and clean all the time.”
But there was a problem.  The doctor’s office catered to the L.A. Hispanic community… and everyone spoke Spanish. Doctors. Nurses. Patients. I had an ominous feeling… if I said yes to the perfect job in the pretty office, I’d be missing out on something far more valuable.
So I showed up to the second interview. It was for a cashier/server position at a fast-food restaurant in a trendy, upscale mall, bordering Beverly Hills.  The job would be far from glamorous.  In addition to helping customers at the register, I’d be expected to finish my evening shift scraping pans, cleaning greasy counters, stocking a walk-in freezer, and mopping sticky floors—but I’d be forced to speak English if I made it past the four week trial period.
I kept that job for a year, and it gave me the confidence to reach for more possibilities: a sales associate job at a major department store… a teller position that turned into a string of promotions over many years at a national bank… junior college… four year college… graduate school—as an English Major.
“Wow!”  People say when they have only watched or heard this “movie trailer” version of the race.
Am I saying it hasn’t been a great journey? Well, let’s say it hasn’t been the race I envisioned. You see, if it had been all up to me, it would’ve been a sprint, a quick 6-8 year dash to the finish line where all my childhood dreams would be waiting for me.
In reality, it has been more like a marathon—a twenty-five year race that it’s not over yet.  Along the way, God had to slow me down, so He could give me an extreme mind and soul makeover.
This marathon has been laden with detours (to correct colossal mistakes I made when I tried to do it my way), pauses (to recover from injuries when against better judgment, I tried to run too fast), slow walks (to catch my breath and strengthen my muscles again), long rest-stops (to reassess my perspective about what is important—time to be a mother… a wife… a daughter… a sister…a friend… a follower of Christ), and some nice and easy sprints (when He gave me fair weather once again).
What has your race been like? Do you feel discouraged by the pace of your race?   Disheartened by what seems like a devastating detour?  Exhausted by running too fast for too long?  Depressed because you feel time is running out?
I have great news!  God has a perfect pace for the race He has called you to run. In fact “He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil. 1:6b).  So no matter how fast you think you can run your race, it will take as long as it needs to be.
Let’s labor heartily and use the gifts and passion God has placed in our hearts every minute of every day.  Let’s reach for our dreams, for they reveal the perfect race He wants us to run. But let’s not rush the race and inadvertently miss these coveted words: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25:21).
The world whispers, “Time is running out.”  Jesus says, “We have eternity together!”
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in the wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
~ Robert Frost