Running

Posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 12:49 pm

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I have finished my course. . . The Apostle Paul

I have not written in a while because I have been thinking.  I know that this can be dangerous, so I have decided that I should start writing again.

This is a picture of my son Josiah (not Joshua!) finishing up his latest cross country race.  He is a great runner and a great son.  I have a picture of my daughter Charity that I was going to upload, but she would kill me.  It is not the best picture of her and I want you to see how beautiful she really is so I will take another picture an put it up later.

I have been struck lately by how much our lives are like a cross country run.  The person who gets out in front first rarely wins.  In fact you can almost always say for certain that the person who starts out in front will not be the one in front at the end of the race.  The race comes with its share of difficulties and there are plenty of opportunities to quit.  At times the the course seems tough, the elements seem to work against the runner and the pain of our bodies screams for us to just stop.  But the good runners don’t.  My son doesn’t; he finishes.  That is why I am so proud of him.  He is a young man who shows forth the work of the Spirit in his life in many ways, but one of the ways is that he realizes that life is not about doing the easy thing but the right thing.  Sometimes finishing is really difficult, but it is the right thing.

I had a friend in college who was a cross country runner.  His name was Tom Gould and he was also a wonderful example of a Godly young man.  I remember one year when the great race was to be held on a cold rainy thanksgiving day (we never went home for thanksgiving at Bob Jones, mainly because most of us could not afford it).  Gould was an all out favorite to win the race but then something happened.  At the start of the race, when runners were jockeying for position, someone stepped on the back of Tom’s shoe and it came off.  He couldn’t stop and put his shoe back on, but the ground was cold and it was raining.  Most of those who saw what happened felt really sorry for Tommy.  This was his day and his race and now it was taken away from him by some quirk.

In the yearbook that year there was a picture of a shoe in a puddle.  It was Tom’s shoe.  It sat there as if in triumph after Tom had won the race with only one shoe on.  Whenever I am tempted to stop, quit, just say forget about it, I remember my friend Tom who pressed on in spite of difficulties that were not his fault and won because he refused to stop running.  I want my son to be a person who refuses to stop running, no matter what God’s providence might send his way.  I want him to be a runner not just in his life, but in his heart.  Let us all strive to be cross country runners in our hearts if not in our lives.

Onward . . .

DrSamLam