Get to Run

Today I ran.  I followed not a training plan nor a schedule of miles, but a meandering path through a sanctuary of trees.  I didn’t measure the distance or even maintain a designated pace.  I ran.  And I rejoiced under a dense canopy of interlaced branches and a thousand shades of green bathed in sunlight. The grandest Gothic cathedral could not compare.  Three gobbling wild turkeys stared as I went past, looking up as if I had invaded their privacy.  And in the middle of a meadow, two deer shyly poked up their heads, almost invisible in the waist-high grass.

After my last marathon, I was barraged by urgent pleas to sign up for another.  Whereas just a few years ago, a runner could sign up on race day or even submit online the night before, today’s races sell out within days or hours, some of them ridiculously more than a half year ahead of the event.  Hurry, hurry, you will miss your ONLY chance!  So, an October race like Chicago, sold out this year in four days.  Boston, for which one must qualify, sold out in less than 8 hours.

Within a day or two of finishing my marathon, people asked me with the same urgency, “So, what’s next?”   Most look at me amazed when I say “Nothing on my radar yet.  Just running.”  WHAT????  as if to say “Can you do that?”   Needless to say, I am still running.  I haven’t given up on it yet.  And I am enjoying this season of NOT being enslaved to a training schedule.  Many days I head out, not even knowing how far I will go or even my route.  I just run.  Sometimes I feel like slipping in a three-miler and end up with seven.  Other times, I take a slow jog around the large retention pond that my village calls a “lake.”  I bask in the shade of ancient trees, along crushed gravel paths, and pray, sing, and think.  Sometimes my brain just shifts into neutral. 

I don’t have to run.  I get to.  There is great freedom and joy in that.

So much in our lives has become regimented, and even those things and relationships we love, are impacted, the very joy crushed out.  Routine and ritual can rob us of delight, and those things in which we should bask leave a dryness in our thoughts.  We go to church, we pray, we take communion, and we forget we are worshipping the Maker of heaven and earth, we are pouring out the cries of our hearts before the God who cares so much that He saves our tears in a bottle, we rush through communion before the Savior who died for OUR wrongdoing.  Our relationship with God becomes a “have-to,” the dry motions of religion instead of a love relationship.

But we don’t have to.  We get to.  God doesn’t work under a paradigm of performance, but of grace.

And there is great freedom and joy in that.