Marathon Good Luck Quotes

While I do not want anyone to miss out on possibly living forever with God, I have come to realize that the Christian life is a marathon. People grow in their faith at different paces depending on their own circumstances in life. The key is to share, love, and encourage people to put their faith in Christ, and when they don’t respond, we simply offer a place of forgiveness to come back to if or when their heart changes. We do not judge or police those who choose not to accept Christ, but we wish them the best of luck. They’re going to need it.

From what I’ve gathered during the time I could stomach listening to your omegas exaggerate every good thing about you, Violet is going tonight to try to talk Arion into some deal with real peace between you two. It’s cute how she thinks life is simply that simple. The omegas adore her just for trying to give it a shot.” He flicks an orange peel away after he licks it clean like he’s the wolf. “The only good part of all this is that I now know you’ll never again get laid by those wolves, no matter how much they praise you to Violet. They’ve not just picked out a girlfriend; they’ve picked you out a mate.” I glare at him, and he just grins, never meeting my eyes. “Too bad I’m way out ahead of you,” he adds. “I’d say Vance is winning, if this is a sprint instead of a marathon,” I tell him, still not even sure if I actually want her or if I just want her long enough to piss them all off. “Vance lucked into his moment and failed to follow-through with charming stalkery. She’s leaving a window open for me at night now.” I roll my eyes as I start heading toward the omega wing.

As implied in Levy’s quote, the process of freely choosing what sort of person you become, despite whatever bad constitutive luck you’ve had, is usually framed as a gradual, usually maturational process. In a debate with Dennett, incompatibilist Gregg Caruso outlined chapter 3’s essence—we have no control over either the biology or the environment thrown at us. Dennett’s response was “So what? The point I think you are missing is that autonomy is something one grows into, and this is indeed a process that is initially entirely beyond one’s control, but as one matures, and learns, one begins to be able to control more and more of one’s activities, choices, thoughts, attitudes, etc.” This is a logical outcome of Dennett’s claim that bad and good luck average out over time: Come on, get your act together. You’ve had enough time to take responsibility, to choose to catch up to everyone else in the marathon.[2] A similar view comes from the distinguished philosopher Robert Kane, of the University of Texas: “Free will in my view involves more than merely free of action. It concerns self-formation. The relevant question for free will is this: How did you get to be the kind of person you now are?” Roskies and Shadlen write, “It is plausible to think that agents might be held morally responsible even for decisions that are not conscious, if those decisions are due to policy settings which are expressions of the agent [in other words, acts of free will in the past].”[3] Not all versions of this idea require gradual acquisition of past-tense free will. Kane believes that “choose what sort of person you’re going to be” happens at moments of crisis, at major forks in the road, at moments of what he calls “Self-Forming Actions” (and he proposes a mechanism by which this supposedly occurs, which we’ll touch on briefly in chapter 10). In contrast, psychiatrist Sean Spence, of the University of Sheffield, believes that those I-had-free-will-back-then moments happen when life is at its optimal, rather than in crisis.