"If you have raced with men on foot and they have worn you out, how can you compete with horses?"
— Jeremiah 12:5
I identify with this verse. The first time I read it, it almost felt like a warning. Like God was saying, you think this is difficult? You haven’t seen anything yet.
But I’ve lived long enough to look back at my life and see every hard thing wasn’t happening to me. It was happening for me. Every difficult season was building something in me that I would absolutely need for what came next.
God wasn’t warning Jeremiah. He was telling him the hard things are the training ground.
I grew up the ninth of ten children in El Paso, right on the border, crossing the bridge into Ciudad Juarez every morning to catch a bus to school in Mexico. I had dyslexia, though no one called it that then. School was a fight every single day.
But I kept going. Because something in me understood, even then, that you don’t get to quit just because it’s hard.
Those were my footmen years. And God was preparing me to run.
When my business partner Dan and I stepped out to start ISP Studios, I wasn’t starting from zero. I was starting from everything I had already survived. And when the recession hit and clients disappeared and other production companies closed their doors around us, I had something underneath me that couldn’t be shaken. A steadiness that God built in me slowly, over years of hard things I had chosen to face head on.
When companies started spending again, ISP was still standing. And we were ready to work.
That’s the verse. That’s exactly what Jeremiah 12:5 is describing.
What I know now is this: The hard things are not a sign that you’re going the wrong direction. They are proof that God is preparing you for something bigger than where you currently are. Every difficult conversation, every door that closed, every season that stretched you past what felt comfortable, that was spiritual muscle being formed. That was endurance being built. That was strength you didn’t even know you needed yet, being deposited in you for a moment still ahead.
You don’t develop that kind of strength in easy seasons. You develop it by running your race and refusing to stop.
So this is for the woman who is in the middle of something hard right now.
The one holding her business together with both hands. The one navigating a season that wasn’t in the plan. The one who is tired in a way that’s hard to explain to people who haven’t felt it.
I see you. And I want you to hear this: You are not falling behind. You are being prepared.
The footmen are not your final assignment. They are your training. And the woman on the other side of this season, the one who ran through it instead of around it, she is going to be ready for things you cannot even imagine right now.
God doesn’t ask questions He doesn’t already know the answer to.
He already knows you can run with horses.
Keep going.