Running on Faith: Breathing

I thought it was just going to be a little training run—another step toward our fall marathon. It was easy to sell the race to Emily, my daughter and training partner. The 13-mile Colfax Half Marathon would go through the zoo, a fire station and some of Denver's prettiest neighborhoods. It'd be a nice change of scenery from our typical training run. Plus, there'd be medals. You can never have too many of those.

You can see us here in the picture, ready for another fun, fantastic run.

And for the first four miles or so, everything was great. The zoo was fun. The neighborhoods were neat. The weather was almost perfect.

And then Emily started feeling sick.

We walked some. Then some more. Instead of counting the miles, I'd scan the streets for porta-potties. Emily was hurting bad. I could tell by how quiet she was. Normally, she talks the miles away on our training runs. But now, during this run, she wasn't speaking. She was fighting too hard with her body to talk, fighting with every step. I'd fill in the void with some mindless patter, hoping to take her mind off things. But nothing I said made her feel a bit better. And so we walked when we had to and ran when we could, listening to each other's footsteps, the sound of the other breathing.

And by mile seven, neither of us was sure it was smart to keep pushing on.

"I don't want to quit," she told me.

"I know you don't," I said. "I know."

A half-mile later, when we hit the fire station, we decided to call it. I dialed my wife Wendy and asked if she'd be able to pick us up along the way.

She couldn't: The car was in the middle of the race traffic. We were on our own.

But just when I feared things might get really messy, Emily rallied. By mile 10, she was feeling better. By 12, the only things wrong with her was her foot and knee and hip—the normal aches and pains that you sometimes get when you run a ways. And by the time she was collecting all her "free" loot after we crossed the finish line—including the medal—she joked, "this is the best day ever!"

 In these little running/religion musings of mine, we've talked about how sometimes both faith and a long run can be a struggle, and that's particularly true of when we're in pain. Our relationship with God can be tricky even the best of times. But when we're suffering or grieving, it can feel nearly impossible. The pain can be overwhelming. We can feel like quitting.

I've done quite a few stories about grieving and suffering over the years, and one central question has been at the center of many of them: How can the rest of us help? If we know someone who's dealing with a crushing loss or battling illness or suffering from indescribable pain, how can we carry a little of that burden? What can we do to ease the discomfort?

The experts always seem to come back to the same, sad fact. Sometimes we can't. We can't always take away the pain. We can't speed up the grieving process. Some things, they just hurt.

But even though we can't take away the pain or speed up the recovery, we can still be there … in body and spirit. We can walk, or run, alongside them. We don't have to talk. Sometimes, it's better if we don't. Just to be with someone—to show them they're not alone—can be a comfort, as small as it might seem.

For one of those stories, I talked with a man who had terminal brain cancer. The man, a lifelong Christian, made a startling omission to me—one so different from the feel-good Christianese that people often wrap themselves in. He said there were times when he prayed that he felt … nothing. God, his great comfort and comforter, was silent.

He added that he's had some incredible times of prayer, too, but him talking about the silence of God struck me. I've felt that same silence sometimes. There are dark nights when God's love seems to cover you like a blanket, but others where the blanket is gone. There is no solace found in that dark, quiet space. No spiritual platitudes to savor, no prayer to serve as salve.

But in those moments, I sometimes think back to an old Lifehouse song called "Breathing." It's a psalm, in a way, that patiently tries to accept those silences, to make sense of them and even embrace them. The chorus goes:

I am hanging on every word you say

And even if you don't want to speak tonight

That's all right, all right with me

'Cause I want nothing more than to sit

Outside heaven's door and listen to you breathing

It's where I want to be.

Emily and I spent a good chunk of the Colfax Half listening to each other breathe. It wasn't fun for either of us (and especially not for Em). But maybe there was something special about those painful few miles, anyway. Emily knew that, run or walk or crawl or stop, I'd be with her no matter what. I felt the strange sense of gratitude of sharing a truly, if painfully, unforgettable time with my daughter—a time beyond smiles and laughter, a time beyond words. It was a time when breathing was as eloquent as it got. And it was enough.

Running on Faith: Aches and Pains

My daughter and I are now in the teeth of our marathon training—the point in time where we start talking about blister mitigation, tote our CamelBaks around and wonder whether we should bring snacks. (I'd like to take nachos, but they'd be a bit messy.)

It's also when I figured we'd be faced with a decision: Would we be able to continue?

Emily's always liked running—more than me, truth be told—and she's already run a couple of 13-plus-mile half marathons. But lately, she’s been struggling with one of her knees. 

Note the girl only has two of them, and both are fairly critical to running 26 miles. And while we weren't worried about her doing any real structural damage to the joint—her doctor said the area around it was just sorta "irritated" and "inflamed" (like me during rush hour)—I didn't want her suffering during our runs. Or, at least, not yet. Let’s face it: Most marathoners deal with some aches and pains when they run, but I didn't want my daughter to be miserable before her time. And on some of our longer runs, Emily’s been running a little like a well-conditioned Quasimodo.

But now, it seems as though her knee’s getting better—thanks in part to Em stretching the thing out whenever possible. She takes ibuprofen the second we head out to cut down on swelling. When I take one of my (frequent) bathroom breaks, she keeps the knee moving so it won’t stiffen up.

And, as I said, it seems to be paying off. We cruised through a 12-mile run without Quasimodo showing up for more than a half a mile of it. It’s feeling better, she says—and her left leg (the one without the injured knee) didn’t get nearly as tired as it sometimes gets, which means her right leg must be working a little bit harder.

Part of long-distance running, I think, is figuring out how to handle a bit of pain. We deal with the aches that come with running 26 miles—from stinging feet and aching backs to blisters and chafing. You learn to listen to your body: Is it screaming or just merely whining? Sometimes, your body absolutely tells you you should stop—before you do some serious long-term damage. But sometimes, like Emily’s knee, it’s just grouchy. It’s tired of putting up with all those miles, and understandably so. But if you can persevere and push through, your body sometimes decides to stop grousing and chip in a little more.

In our lives and our journeys of faith, we experience pain, too. Sometimes, the pain can be the product of really serious stuff: Loss. Heartbreak. Sickness. A crisis in the family or at work. When we suffer pain like this, we can’t go on as if nothing had happened. We’ve got to stop. We’ve got to heal.

But sometimes, the pain can be just part of life—irritants from a broken world that get into our joints and make it hard to push on.

I think that pain manifests itself a little differently for each of us, and it can come from loads of different places. We grow frustrated, disenfranchised. When it comes to spirituality, we lose sight of Christ and focus instead on all the fallible Christians and the imperfect trappings of Christianity. We get mad at our pastor or struggle with hypocrisy (be it ours or someone else’s). We grow intolerant at our own apparent inadequacies or bridle under its restrictions. Somewhere along the line, many of us Christians find that being Christian just hurts sometimes. And it’s tempting to just stop … because we hate the pain and we understand that that hurt won’t just go away. It’ll be with us, at some level, with every step.

But if we persevere, we find we can manage it. Just understanding the pain is bound to be there, actually, goes a long way toward accepting it. We stretch—not our knees, but our brains and our souls. The more limber they are, the more effectively we can sort through our issues intellectually—and more generous our souls can be with the shortfalls we see. 

This is the unsexy part of faith—the work of the thing. We can talk all we want about our relationship with God, but we sometimes conveniently forget that successful relationships take work. And that sometimes, through no fault of God’s, they can be painful.

And yet, we know it’s worth it. It’s worth the work, worth pushing through pain. It’s better to go forward than move back. Because in the end, we’ll see the object of all of our hard work … and it’ll all be worth it.