Running Away? I Wonder...

photobucket.com

I like to run. I'm not sure it likes me back, though. But, I need to be really honest. Running gives me a good excuse for the solitude I often prefer over the anxiety that comes with being around people. I like being alone. Always have. It may all boil down to my fear of intimacy. The problem with getting to know others is they get to know you back and it’s often much easier being perceived as the person you want to be instead of being known for who you really are.

My left knee, especially doesn’t appreciate this affection for running.  I’m not sure how much more it can take. It’s becoming harder and harder to bend and along with many of my other joints, it creaks like an old wooden floor. I suppose my body is trying to tell me something, but the allure of a morning run is just too captivating.

photobucket.com

It’s still an escape, though, even if getting out of bed the next morning is harder than it used to be. It's a peaceful place alone on that road with nothing, but your thoughts and the occasional passing car to keep you company. It’s a time of contemplation. It's a large stadium full of nothing. It's a church sanctuary dark and empty. It's one of the places I find easiest in being honest with myself and where the competing voices alive in my head speak a little more clearly. It’s the one time, in that wide open space, where the world’s demands don’t really account for much. So, I keep lacing up my shoes. I keep confronting that brutal pavement.

It has often occurred to me that running is simply a metaphor for something more spiritual. Religion has filled my life for as long as I can remember, but I wonder if all this time I’ve really been running from God. Have I been running from his demands?  Have I been rejecting his call?  Have I been following my own path?  Have I been abandoning His call to searing waters for the lesser responsibilities of the tepid temperatures I've more readily embraced?

photobucket.com

So far it’s been a long run full of high peaks and low valleys. At times I've felt his voice close to me while at others those sounds were distant echoes lost in a vast maze of lonely caverns. I've tried to distill from my religious past a real and tangible faith useful for the future. Mostly though, I feel trapped on a merry-go-round trying to escape the chains of a past that just won't let go.

photobucket.com

 I’ve see-sawed back and forth between my knowledge of law and a desire for grace trying to find the perfect fulcrum precariously balancing the two. I’ve tried to understand how much effort He requires for something I could never earn anyway. And, in the midst of it all, I’ve laid awake on countless nights wondering if the beauty and design of everything I discern through my senses points definitively to the God for whom I search.

I’ve spent much time trying to reconcile all the things about this faith that trouble me most. How a man after God's own heart could steal another's wife and ultimately kill him to disguise the sin. How men could  witness God himself and turn their backs just the same. How great men could use women and slaves as nothing more valuable than cattle in a barn and sometimes even less. How twelve men who saw his miracles could so readily abandon the Christ in his darkest hour.

I just hope this metaphor is incomplete. I pray I’ll discover that narrow path and find this great God standing ready at its gate. I pray that despite my efforts to avoid him or reason him out of existence on that road, sooner or later I'll run right into the arms of the one thing I tried best to escape.

photobucket.com

For my part, answers are slow in coming and His voice has grown faint. But, this is a marathon not a sprint. And so for now, I think I'll just keep on running...


1 Corinthians 9:26 NIV
Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air.

Proverbs 18:10 NIV
The name of the LORD is a strong tower; the righteous run to it and are safe.

photobucket.com