It’s ninety-three degrees in downtown Oklahoma City and I’m walking in it.
There’s enough wind that it’s a convection oven rather than a regular one, which I’m choosing to count as a mercy. I was in my office this morning working a problem and at some point my brain informed me that it would not be cooperating further until the body moved. So here I am.
I didn’t used to do this. Anything over about eighty-five and I’d have found a reason to skip it.
What changed was three years ago in Texas. The company I worked for was in merger talks and I could feel what that was doing to me, and I knew I needed to move and I badly needed to be somewhere nobody could reach me. There was a walking trail that ran around our building and the one across the street, past a golf course. I started using it.
Then Texas summer arrived and my first thought was that I’d have to quit for a few months.
My second thought was: why?
I liked the walk. I liked the quiet and the room to think and being temporarily unavailable to everything I was carrying. None of that stopped being true at ninety-five degrees. So I kept going. My longest one in triple digits was about forty-five minutes and I came back soaked through and completely satisfied.
Sunday we had a guest pastor at church, preaching out of Acts.
It’s the passage where Paul is teaching in an upstairs room and goes long — really long — and a young man named Eutychus, sitting in a window, falls asleep and drops out of it and dies. Paul goes down, and the boy is restored, and then everybody goes back upstairs and Paul, as far as I can tell, keeps preaching.
I’ve sat under men who could have used that as a cautionary tale. Paul isn’t one of them. That church was weeks old, the doctrine was being laid down for the first time, and some of the people in that room had probably seen Jesus with their own eyes. I’d have stayed in the window too.
But that story was the setup. The question underneath it was the thing that got me.
If you have an expectation, is your preparation at the level of that expectation?
The pastor’s point was that if you’re praying for something and doing nothing to get ready for it, you might want to look hard at what you’ve actually got. Faith prepares. A wish just goes up into the sky.
That one caught me square and I’ve been carrying it around for four days.
Here’s the honest inventory. My expectations this year have been enormous — turn a corner in my writing, build income outside the day job, actually be successful at something I made. I’ve said all of that out loud, some of it in public.
And my preparation has been better than it’s ever been. Two books finished. An album. Something written and posted every single day since January first. Nobody can tell me I haven’t worked.
But when I hold the two things up next to each other, there are mile-wide gaps and I can see every one of them.
What I do is get so locked onto the expectation — and onto what I don’t have yet — that I stop building the capacity to hold the thing when it shows up. I’m praying about the harvest and I have not been checking the barn.
The strange part is that I already know how to do this. I just haven’t been doing it everywhere.
Three years ago I decided a walk mattered enough that I’d take it in a hundred degrees, and I’ve never once renegotiated that. When it’s time to walk I don’t stand at the door and debate about it.
That’s what preparation matching expectation actually looks like, and I’ve had a working model of it strapped to my own feet the entire time.
I’m forty-eight as of two days ago, and I’m two miles into a hot walk, and I know exactly which barn needs building.
David Willis 