Kickoff 5K

Sarah and I sat in my car in front of Arrowhead Stadium, staring at the frozen tundra before us. There was snow and ice covering the parking lot, and the windchill was almost below zero.

"We could just go to IHOP and eat pancakes and drink coffee."

"I mean, we could. But we're already here. Let's just do it, and then we'll feel awesome."

" . . . ok . . . "

It was my second race of the year, a year in which I had challenged myself to run one 5K a month, and two 10Ks. Compared to current conditions, the last race I ran in 20 degree temperatures seemed like a Hawaiian vacation. If I thought I was crazy for doing the last race, at this point I was certifiably insane. Sarah and I had gotten to the race super early, and we sat in my car for almost an hour, absorbing as much heat as we could. We waited until the absolute last minute to get out of the car and run over to the starting line. 

Sarah headed to the back, and I went to the very front. I wanted to finish this thing ASAP, and I had told her that she could find me in the car when the race was over, recovering from the hypothermia and frostbite that would surely set in. 

As soon as the race organizers gave us the word, off we all went. I was already annoyed that my Spotify music app wasn't working, meaning I couldn't listen to my normal running playlist that keeps me motivated. I had to go with another internet radio app, Pandora, and I was at the whim of whatever came on the station it was on. It turned out to be my Hillsong United station, a popular worship band from Australia, and the mix of songs that played had to have been divinely influenced. 

On the first mile I wondered if my face would actually freeze solid and fall off. The sun was trying to peek out, and I prayed that it would make an appearance, having mercy on us all. I focused on my breathing, and within a few minutes, my body was warm, and I wasn't so much thinking about the cold. I quickly realized that the worship music that was playing in my ears was so much more encouraging than the playlist I had planned. About a half mile in, I felt God's presence with me very tangibly, and I knew how proud He was of me for choosing to run that race despite all the good reasons I had not to. I started to cry, but I considered the bitter temperatures and decided I didn't want my tears to freeze to my face, so I got ahold of myself.

I passed a tall, athletic looking black guy in mile two. I was holding a steady pace, but he would run past me and then stop to walk. Then he would run past me again and walk again. It was almost like when a car keeps passing you on the highway, only to slow down to where you have to pass them. Then they speed up and pass you again. It drives me nuts (no pun intended). Sadly, there is no cruise control setting on a human being. I wondered if he figured he just couldn't let tiny me run ahead of him. 

In mile three, we passed our original starting point as we completed a full circle around both Arrowhead Stadium and Kauffman Stadium. Cutting across the parking lot we ran between the two looming structures, Kauffman on my left and Arrowhead on my right. I remember thinking it was fitting to be running around a baseball and football stadium where so much athletic talent is on display throughout the year. Chiefs and Royals jokes aside, a part of that athletic spirit was pushing me forward. 

As I rounded the last corner on the other side of the stadiums, I sprinted towards the finish line. All I could think about was pancakes and hot coffee. After a quick finish line selfie, I decided to backtrack and find Sarah. Walking slowly back to the last corner before the finish line, I waited for my friend. When she reached me, we jogged the last few hundred yards to the finish line together, high-fiving as we crossed. It was a much better feeling than waiting for her back at the car. 

My official time was 33:11.7. It's certainly not a record setter, but it is much better than the 00:00.0 I would have gotten if I hadn't run at all. 

Stuffing myself with grits and eggs at Cracker Barrel after the race, I realized that half the battle in life is just getting to the starting line. I felt like a Roman gladiator for what I had accomplished that day, and I would have missed out on that feeling if I'd given in to my mind telling me to quit before I'd even started. Luckily, Sarah had told me to man up, and I had listened. So stop making excuses and get started. And make sure you have a Sarah in your life to keep you from missing a chance to achieve your goals. The grits and coffee taste so much better when you do. 

Looking very determined on the right. 

Hands raised in victory heading for the finish!

My best friend who keeps me going. 

The Battle of the Bean

The wind was blowing very hard as I sat in my car, contemplating whether or not I would put on my scarf, or tough it out. It was January 18, 2014, the morning of my first race of the year, The Battle of the Bean 5K. I had proclaimed to all of my friends and family just a few weeks before that my New Year's resolution was to run one 5K a month in 2014, with at least two 10Ks mixed in. With a race time windchill that morning in the 20s, I was seriously questioning my sanity. "Runners are nuts", I thought to myself.

I decided to go with both a scarf and gloves, and I walked slowly across the street to the starting line. This was the first race I had run by myself, so there was no one to chat with before things got going. My legs and arms were sore from too much gym time that week, and I wondered if I would be able to run the whole way without injuring myself. I stuck my headphones in and waited for our heat to make it to the front of the race chute.

As I crossed the starting line and began to run, I felt pretty good, and my muscles warmed up fast. My quads were burning a bit, but the discomfort was manageable. Once the field spread out, I picked a blonde girl running slightly ahead of me as my "pace car". She had a turquoise shirt on and would be easy to pick out from the mass of runners. I told myself I would run 10 -15 feet behind her for the duration of the race, and I would not pass her. We would run the race together, even though she didn't know it. This seemed symbolic to me as to how we should live life; together. What is the point of racing ahead of everyone and crossing the finish line alone?

Somewhere between mile one and two, as we were winding through a neighborhood, a little girl, about five years old, and her mother came into view on my left. They had set up a chalk board at the curb that said, "Keep going! Run fast!" and the little girl was high-fiving the runners as they passed. I smiled as I saw them, and choked back a little lump in my throat. There is something heartwarming about a complete stranger cheering you on, and I veered off course a bit to give her a high five.

As we ran along our course, there were police officers and race monitors guiding us in the right direction. There were arrows painted on the streets and orange cones directing our path. In that moment, I couldn't help but wish life were so easy to navigate.

Between mile two and three, I started to feel tired, and as I chugged up a slight hill that felt like Mount Everest, I thought about stopping. I tried to justify stopping by using my sickness the previous weekend as an excuse. I didn't eat much that morning. I hadn't been training as much as I should have been. It would be ok to stop. Maybe I could just stop for 30 seconds; that wouldn't be so bad. I had lost my turquoise-shirted pace car about a block ago, and I should wait for her to catch up.

Regardless of all the good reasons I came up with to stop, I kept going. I decided that I had to forge ahead. I looked behind me and couldn't even see my race buddy anywhere. Did she stop? I reasoned that sometimes in life, there will be people that are doing their best, but hold you back, and sometimes you have to move on without them. I felt a bit like Judas, but she didn't know we were "running together" anyway.

As I got to the end of the street and turned the corner, I realized I had hit mile three, and the finish line was in sight. I couldn't believe I had thought about stopping when I was so close to the end. I hadn't realized how close I was. Spurred on by adrenaline, I sprinted past those ahead of me and let out a whoop as I neared the end. I choked back another lump in my throat as I soared across the finish line, the crowd clapping and whistling as I slowed to a stop. I had finished strong, and I felt great.

My official time was 32:14.2, which was much better than I expected. After collecting my free custard, chocolate, and cocoa, I spotted my turquoise-shirted friend. I knew she'd finish just fine.

Today's race impressed upon me how often we want to quit when we don't realize how close we are to finishing. There is a rather cliche but true fitness saying that goes something like, "Just when you want to quit, push yourself a little bit harder. That's how you grow stronger." Cliche but true, and this runner grew a little bit stronger today.

Crossing the finish line!

Knock, knock

As I stood in the street outside my dad's house over ten years ago, I was so nervous I wanted to puke. I hadn't seen him since I was in third grade. I was then a freshman in college. It took me twenty minutes of pacing back and forth in front of his house that night to get up the nerve to ring the doorbell. 

As I sat parked in my mother's driveway last Saturday night, I felt nothing but indifference. I might as well have been pulling up to Walgreens to buy mascara. I hadn't seen her in over two years. I parked in the driveway, grabbed my bags, and walked resolutely up to the door. 

She welcomed me in and hugged me. She said she was glad to see me and that she loved me very much. As I put my arms around her to hug her, I felt like I was hugging a mannequin or a robot. It seemed empty.

The conversation was awkward and sputtering. For a person that usually has a lot to say, nothing compelling came to my mind. I met mom's fiancée, Kyle, who lives with her now. We sat in the basement for several painful minutes watching Kyle's two cats play with fake mice and eat cat treats. Two cats? Mom hates cats. She showed me her engagement ring, and I told her it was very nice. Kyle went to bed soon after I got there so mom and I could "catch-up". 

Usually when you "catch-up," both parties inquire of each other about the goings on in their lives and each person shares in turn. Mom just kept talking about how great her life is and how great Kyle is and how in love she is. She asked me if I was happy that she is so happy. I told her I was, of course. She continued on about her great life, never asking my about my life and whether or not it's great, so I just listened. Then she talked about how she wants us to have a relationship again, and she launched into what seemed like a political commercial, listing all the reasons I should trust her again. I felt like she was asking for my vote. It all seemed so fake. 

I sat there on my kitchen stool and wondered who this person was in front of me. And as she spoke, re-writing history with every word, I was reminded again of how different her past is from the one I remember living through. I was too tired to be angry or indignant, so I just sighed quietly and told her that we just can't talk about some things, and I was glad to give our relationship a go again as long as it didn't turn into what it was before. Because I'm tired of being hurt, and if she tries to hurt me again, she'll lose me forever. 

Driving home the next day, I tried to think through what had happened and how I felt. It's an odd thing to have no feelings at all for a parent. I told God that if this relationship was to blossom again, he'd have to really till the soil of my heart so that new life in our relationship could grow. But even if he tilled the soil, I have no desire to do any planting, weeding, fertilizing, or tending. So what's the point? What is the point of maintaining this relationship?

And that's the question I'm still looking for answers to. I know what I should do, and I know what I want to do. I can't seem to reconcile the two. 

Moments

For most of my time on this planet, life has been a series of ups and downs; extreme highs and extreme lows, with only a few times spent somewhere in between. Over the past couple of years, there have been a handful of times where something within me made me stop to survey my life and say to myself, "Life is really amazing. I'm so happy. I'm so blessed." And they aren't necessarily the moments you'd think they'd be. I had another moment like that last night.

I was driving home from church after a Superbowl party my friends and I had thrown together. The turn-out was pretty good, and I got to spend the evening stuffing my face and watching my favorite sport with my favorite people. Everybody pitched in to make it happen, and it was pretty flawless in execution. At one point Ben, who cooked all the hotdogs for us, said to me, "Hey, thanks for putting all this together. It was a lot of fun," and those sitting around the table concurred. I thanked him but pointed out that it was a team effort, because it absolutely was, and I thanked all of them for helping out. Later, my friends Cara and Suzanne stayed long past when they were obligated to, to help me clean up the kitchen. My friend Bill closed up the building and took out the trash when he could have left much earlier. My buddy Fred texted after he left to let me know he'd come the next day to vacuum and put a spit polish on the place. I smiled and hummed softly to myself as I left the church. "I have great friends," I thought. As I turned into my apartment complex a few minutes later, I realized what struck me most about the evening was the sense of doing it all together and being a part of something that meant something to someone. Something as trivial as a Fantasy Football league really turned into something bigger and deepened our relationships with each other. You see, the older I get, the more I feel like what I'm doing in life isn't important. And God always reminds me that it's most often the littlest of things that make life rich. Things like Super Bowl parties with really amazing people.

Life is about community. If you aren't living in a good community, life doesn't have much meaning. I realized that at each of those moments in time, where I was stopped in my tracks by how amazing life was and is, it was at moments when I felt loved, supported, accepted, significant, and surrounded. Surrounded by people who made me a better person. People who I felt really liked me. Most of these moments were at times when I felt very close to my family, my friends, and God. And the times I felt the lowest in life were times when I felt the most alone. I know that isn't a coincidence. Life is easier and richer when you do it with other people.

When I get caught in one of those good moments, I try to hold onto it as long as I can, and I memorize every piece of it; every ray of sunshine, every laugh, every song, every joke, every hug, every tear. Because when the present becomes the past, all we have is the memory. And if we spend too much time waiting on the future to get here, we'll miss how amazing the present is. I sometimes wonder if I am the only person who has to consciously tell themselves, "Hey, you are having a great time. Focus. This is a great moment. Soak it up. Be present." I struggle to stop looking forward to the great things I have planned for the future and focus on the great things I am doing right now. These moments are what life is about. And I think that if you are doing life right, you'll remember so many great moments that they will just blend together into one amazing life.

Honor your mother and father?

As humans, we have difficulty letting go of the past. We have trouble forgiving others who have hurt us or who have hurt those we love. We feel justified in our anger or our refusal to reconcile. We carry our pain with us all the time; sometimes hiding it deep inside our hearts. It can be a barrier to trust, respect, and intimacy in other relationships. We may eventually reach a place of forgiveness. Despite the scars we bear on our hearts, we are able to find a place of peace, of healing, and of love. We can look back on the events of the past and see them as a marker of how far we’ve come and where we don’t want to return. But when this process of healing and forgiveness only takes place for us, and not the one who hurt us, it can make reconciliation impossible and even harmful. And the question then becomes, “How can I love this person and honor them when they continue to try to hurt me, themselves, or others?” And fear creeps in that they may put us back in the dark place of pain again if we allow them to be in our lives. It’s easier to walk away. It’s easier to ignore the phone calls or the emails. But it's not so easy when it's a member of our own family. Our mother or our father. It's one thing to cut off contact with an ex, it's quite another to do the same with someone who literally gave us life. It takes a lot more guts, love, and long-suffering to choose to honor that person in whatever small way we can. And then it's just a matter of letting your heart guide you into exactly what that looks like. Because it looks different for all of us.

The Road Ahead

I felt really depressed yesterday thinking about my future. Not that my future is really bleak or anything, it's just that I feel like I'm in a never-ending phase of my life in which I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing and where I'm going. For some reason, I just felt a wave of depression and hopelessness wash over me. I wondered if I would always feel this way: lost.

I always tell myself that this is part of being in your twenties. Whenever I talk to people my same age, they tell me they are struggling with the same things. I think the most frustrating part of all is that I know what I want to do, I just don't know exactly how to get to a place where I can do it. And when I say that to people, they usually rush to ask me all these questions and give all these suggestions about how I can get there and what I should do to get there. I understand they are trying to be helpful, but I want to say to them: "Don't you think I've already thought of all those things?"

I think the real issue is the fact that, sometimes in life, you have to take a leap of faith and do something crazy. It's hard. It's hard because "leap of faith" indicates you don't exactly know what is going to happen when you leap. You have to have faith that, if you leap, you'll land on the other side, and if you fall off a cliff, God will be there to either catch you, or meet you at the bottom to sweep of the pieces and superglue them back together. It's the leaping that has me stuck right now.

I want to leap so badly. I see others leap, and I'm so jealous of their faith. I see people post pictures on Facebook of themselves standing in front of the pyramids in Egypt, hiking the highlands of Scotland, making lewd gestures at the guards outside of Buckingham palace, and I want so desperately for that to be me. So why isn't it? Why can't that be me?

For the moment, I feel like I might be inside a cocoon, waiting to come out and fly away to wherever I wish. I read somewhere that if you were to cut open a cocoon before whatever inside emerges on it's own, you will kill whatever is inside. I'm trusting right now that God has me still wrapped up in my cocoon because there are things that must be completed in me before I emerge. I just hope I emerge sooner rather than later.

Little Me

I was pondering the other day what I was like as a child, and I suddenly had the thought, "I wish I could travel back in time and give that little girl a big hug, and tell her that everything was going to be ok."

At the moment I was having these thoughts, I was remembering a time during my parents' divorce when I was hugging my dad as he was dropping me off at my mom's house. He was going away on business, and I told him I wanted to stay with him and that I didn't want him to go. I could see that he was torn, even at such a young age, but he told me I needed to be with my mom, and that he'd see me again soon. I remember he picked me up off the ground and hugged me very tight. With my head rested on his shoulder, I saw my mother watching us from the window at the front door, and I immediately felt guilty. I tried to wriggle out of my dad's grasp because I didn't want my mom to see that I missed my dad. I didn't want her to get angry and yell. I remember going inside and crying because I also felt guilty for hurting my dad. I had seen the hurt in his eyes as he left. And that's when I had this thought; this strong desire to reach back into that memory and hug that little girl as she cried, and tell her that she is loved and that it's not her fault. I would explain that mommy might try to say that daddy is a bad person, but not to believe it, and to always believe that her daddy does love her. I would wipe the tears from her little face and fix her mussed hair and explain that she will go through some hard times, but to always remember that she has great worth and value, and that one day she will grow up to be a really cool person.

There was another time I thought of that still makes me angry to this very day. When I was in first grade, a girl in my class named Nicole told the teacher that I had spit on her. This hit me out of the blue when they confronted me about it, as I didn't do it and had no idea what they were talking about. I don't even know why this girl said it. I barely knew her. I recall being so angry that they just believed her and convicted me of the offense without any real evidence at all. I can see myself now, sitting in an empty classroom, sobbing my eyes out while everyone else was out at recess. Even my mom didn't believe me, and eventually I had to write an apology letter to this girl for something I didn't even do. At the age of six, I couldn't understand how the world could be so unfair. I laid my head on my desk, and I cried and cried until I pretty much passed out. If I could, I would travel back to that empty classroom, wrap that little girl in my arms, and tell her that I believed she didn't do it. I would give her a tissue, and as she blew her nose and wiped her tears, I would explain that sometimes people say things that aren't true for no reason at all. Sometimes people are bored, or jealous, or just plain mean, and they hurt people that have done nothing to them for their own entertainment or satisfaction. I would have told her to stand up for herself, maintain her innocence, and refuse to write an apology letter, consequences be damned.

The last memory that flashed through my mind was from a time when I was about seven and my grandparents were visiting for Christmas. We had a nice dinner, and I remember my grandpa was stealing food off my plate, which he and I found hilarious, and my grandma found irritating. My mom had left the house to run an errand and my grandmother started to clean up the dishes. I don't remember her and grandpa arguing, but I do remember that, all of the sudden, my grandpa cornered grandma at the sink, grabbed her around the waist, pinning her against the counter and said, "I'll give you something to really yell about Margaret, when I break this plate over your damn head!" I can still see that gray dinner plate with dandelions on it hovering in the air above the sink, poised over grandma. My sister and I were frozen on the other side of the kitchen, just watching it all unfold, dumbfounded. Grandma was screaming, and she yelled at my sister and I to call 911. We remained frozen, just watching, not knowing what to do. I think my sister did grab the phone, but as soon as she did, grandpa released grandma and mumbled something like, "Oh for Christ sake, I wasn't really going to hit her," and he stomped off down the stairs. If it were possible, I would appear there in that kitchen, kneel down in front of that frozen, silently sobbing little girl, and taking her hands in mine I would explain to her that grandma and grandpa had some problems in their marriage that had nothing to do with her. Grandpa simply lost his temper, as we all do sometimes, but he expressed it in a bad way. I would tell her it's not her fault, and that grandma and grandpa love her very much.

I think there are memories like these for all of us. Memories that are so strong and still so painful. It makes me so angry sometimes that no one told me the things I needed to hear at those times. No one explained anything, and I was just left to wonder what I'd done wrong. I grieve for children that are going through exactly the same things. It literally makes me sick to know that there are children out there that are feeling what I felt: children who witness abuse, verbal and physical, children who go through messy, spiteful divorces, children who are subject to bullying. I see them being screamed at in malls, walking by themselves to school, or being eulogized on the news. It makes you wonder how their lives would have been different if someone had cared enough to love them, and explain this sometimes terrible, unfair, and confusing world we live in.

It's odd to think about the fact that the little girl in those memories, and the person I am now are indeed the same person. God is good, and he continues to heal me and help me understand everyday.