Running on Faith: The Marathon

When you train for a marathon, there's a lot of stuff you need to account for. You've got to train like crazy to get your body ready for the thing. You have to mentally prepare yourself for being on the road for several hours. You have to plan what to wear, given the fact that marathons here in Colorado might have huge changes in temperature and weather. You need to make sure your running bib's just right, you've got enough food in your pockets and you've put Vaseline on anything that could conceivably chafe.

Oh, and it helps to bring your running shoes.

Emily, my daughter, forgot hers. We were staying overnight in Denver for the Colfax Marathon--her first--and she brought everything else she might ever need for this or any other marathon: hats, gloves, shorts, sweatpants, Ibuprofen, Pepto-Bismol and safety pins. But she left her running shoes at home. She discovered it at 4:30 a.m., just 5 minutes before we were to drive to the starting line.

When you're running for 26 miles, shoes are a big deal. Sure, I've heard of folks who run marathons barefoot and say it's the best. But let's face it: Those people are crazy. When you've trained six months for one running event, you know how cantankerous your feet can get. The least you can do is give them some expensive shoes in which to cantanker.

She must've felt sick when she figured out her mistake. I know I did. Months of training, I thought. Her first marathon, down the tubes, I thought. There's no way she's going to be able to finish. No way.

What I actually said was, "Oh." And then, "That's kind of a bummer."

Because really, at that point, what can you do? You've either got to race or go home, and we weren't about to go home. The last thing Emily needed was her father to freak out.

Fortunately, my wife had a pair of old sneakers with her (pictured above, at the starting line) --just a size-and-a-half smaller than Emily typically wears. Sure, they weren't the most comfortable things. Sure, they were five years old and had the tread of a 1953 inner tube. But they were a better alternative than Emily's flip-flops.

For the last few months, I've talked about how training for a marathon reminds me sometimes of our journey of faith. It requires discipline. Patience. We might suffer aches and pains along the way. And we get to experience a lot of joy, too: The gentle thrill of running, the fun of spending concentrated hours with someone where all you can do is talk, the wonderful feeling you get when a long training run is over.

Most importantly, you have the thrill of knowing, in the end, you've done something pretty worthwhile. You've been a part of something pretty special.

And when you're training for a marathon, the actual marathon is, you know, kind of a big deal: The proverbial carrot at the end of the stick, the fresh-baked donut after a six-hour hike on Pikes Peak. In my little catalog of running/faith metaphors, finishing a marathon would be, I suppose, akin to getting to heaven--the shiny medal being the equivalent of God telling you, "Well done, good and faithful servant."(Only when we reach heaven, I hope we won't be quite as sweaty and achey.)

I was not really prepared to figure out a metaphor for forgetting one's shoes. But maybe I should've. After all, I'm sure she's not the first. Unexpected things happen to lots of runners. I know one runner who tripped during a marathon and knocked out a couple of teeth--and still managed to finish. I knew another who started bleeding from his nipples. (Yeah, remember that Vaseline? Important stuff.)

Maybe the lesson here is that, sometimes when things go a little crazy--either through your fault or just by happenstance--we've got to lean on God. There's nothing more we can do. We've put in the time and effort and energy. But in the end, success or failure is out of our hands. We must sit back, enjoy the experience and let God do His thing.

Those moments can be liberating, in a way. We cling so tightly to our own agendas and place so much trust in our own plans. it's a strangely great feeling to unclench our hands and open them to the heavens, ready to catch what we may.

When I heard Emily left her shoes, what I said was, "Oh." Perhaps that translates to, "Thy will be done."

The story has a happy ending, by the way. Emily's substitute shoes carried her through all 26.2 miles. She ran almost the entire way. And while her feet were hurting by the end, they didn't hurt nearly as much as I feared. Be it by God's grace or the wonderful resiliency of 19-year-old feet or a combination of both, Em made it to the finish line and accepted her well-earned medal. If I hadn't been so tired myself, I would've hoisted her over my head in celebration.

The finish line didn't look anything like heaven for either of us. But for her, two words seemed quite appropriate: Well done.

Running on Faith: New Shoes

When we’re little, the only thing separating us from awesome, near-superhuman powers is the right set of shoes.

 When I was in first grade, I assumed I was horrible in gym class because my shoes were lame. I was sure if I could just talk Mom into buying a pair of popular sneakers—something that had some cool racing stripes on the side, maybe—I’d be way better at kickball and dodgeball. And running? I’d be a tiny blur, able to run faster than our station wagon and leap over small ponies.

 Yessir. A pair of the right set of shoes would make all the difference, I thought.

 And you know what? I was right.

 Last week, I bought a new pair of running shoes. It was time. My old ones were looking like a couple of unidentified bits of roadkill (they smelled suspiciously like that, too). After a five-mile run, they felt as forgiving as a pair of tiny granite countertops.

 And while my new shoes, alas, didn’t give me superhuman powers—I was still just as stubbornly slow as ever—the difference was nothing short of revolutionary.

To run in new shoes is like running on cotton candy, tho’ not as sticky. Lacing them up is like strapping a pair of singing rainbows to your soles. Oh, sure, that sense of luxurious tranquility may be long gone by the time you hit mile seven. But runners take what comfort we can.

As I’ve said before, I think running has something in common with our walk of faith. And I think there are times when our spiritual journeys can use their own set of new shoes.

I gotta be honest: I’d recently been in a bit of a Bible-reading funk. While I try to read the Bible pert near every day, a few months ago, I hit a wall, right in the middle of Proverbs. I’d had enough of hearing about wise men and fools and virtuous women and children in need of a whuppin’—at least for a little while. I put down the Good Book and told myself I’d pick it back up in a few days.

After a couple of months, I figured out something was amiss. Turns out, I think, I might’ve just needed some new shoes: Or, more to the point, I needed a new plan for reading the Bible.

Well into my home Bible-reading drought, the ministry I work at launched into Biblica’s Community Bible Experience. We were given New Testaments that had been stripped of their chapters and verses, and the books themselves had been shoved into an unfamiliar (though, the folks at Biblica tell us, a more historically accurate) order. We were asked to plow through the Testament during our normal devotionals.

Now, I’d be lying to you if I said the experience radically changed the way I think about my faith (though some people apparently have). But I did come away with a new appreciation of the Scriptures that inform that faith. The books, stripped as they were of their standard biblical trappings, seemed to take on new resonance and urgency and power.

For instance: There were no red letters in the Community Bible Experience.

Now, I know that many of you may love those red letters. And that’s great. But I come from a newspaper background, where copy was just black letters on white newsprint. My editors were constantly stripping all sorts of emphases out of my stories—my clever italics and my moments of ALL CAPS. They said that my words should carry the story. If I needed to utilize extra bells and whistles to convey a point, perhaps I should use stronger words. And ever since then, italics (which I still use often) and other typographical doo-dads have struck me as visual cheats.

Red-lettering Christ’s words always feels a bit like a cheat to me—as if readers can’t be trusted to pay attention otherwise. It’s not like Jesus, when he walked the earth, had angels angels playing trumpets before he spoke (at least not too often), or his disciples shouting to the crowd, “LISTEN! THIS IS IMPORTANT!” Jesus’ words should be powerful enough on their own that we shouldn’t need a colorful cue to tell us to pay attention.

And, through the Bible Experience, I discovered Jesus’ words carried plenty of oomph even when they weren’t red. In Mark’s sturdy prose, Jesus’ words sounded like poetry. In John’s beautiful, graceful book, Christ’s voice still carried above all.

It’s amazing what a few little changes in a familiar book will do.

I don’t think Bible readers in a funk, like me, need to turn to the Community Bible Experience. They might need to just plow through a new reading program or pick up a new translation. Cruising through a few books in The Message can be kinda revelatory, too. It doesn’t mean you have to punt your trusty King James or NIV. I’ve still got my regular Bible by the nightstand—and I’m reading it again, too, beginning again at the beginning as I’m prone to do. But I’m eager to read it again. I just needed something new to get me going again.

As long as we’re Christians, the Bible’s going to be with us always. We should turn to it day after day—for inspiration, for guidance, for comfort. Its words are constant, its message eternal. In the beginning was the Word, John says. And in the end, the Word will be with us still. It’s as important to us as—just as important, and more, as shoes are to most runners. They’re both with us step for step, mile after mile. They make, for many of us, the run possible.

But every now and then, it doesn’t hurt to get a new pair of shoes. It doesn’t hurt to look at the Bible in a new way, with fresh eyes. The experience can be rejuvenating, invigorating. Even beautiful.