Joyfully Run Your Course

Our family has been involved in track-and-field and cross-country for a few years now. The season, which started last week, is marked by a feeling of exuberance in mind, spirit, and body. Everyone comes home feeling tired and sore, but happy.

I can see several parallels between running and the Christian walk. In running, if you finish the race you are always a winner. If you did your “personal best”, you have won first place in your own way. The sport is one in which a win for the individual is a win for the entire team.

Everything you do – on each and every day, not just race day - influences how you do in the race. The runner must watch everything he puts into his mouth. She must be early to bed and early to rise. It is a life of temperance. What is good for the mind, spirit, and body, is good for running. So too, the discipline and strength that is built by running will help a person not only in other sports but in many other spiritual, intellectual, and social aspects of life.

Christianity, too, is a way of life. It is marked not just by walking into the Church on Holy Days. Everything we say, think, see, hear, and feel feeds the soul and affects our relationships with God and others. God has given us a Book to let us know what is good for us. If we read this Book and absorb it into our hearts, it becomes a way of life that can only yield good.

“The heavens declare the glory of God;;
The sky proclaims its builder’s craft.
One day to the next conveys that message;
One night to the next imparts that knowledge.
There is no word or sound;
No voice is heard;
Yet their report goes forth through all the earth,
Their message, to the ends of the world.
God has pitched there a tent for the sun;
It comes forth like a bridegroom from his chamber,
And like an athlete joyfully runs its course.
From one end of the heavens it comes forth;
Its course runs through to the other;
Nothing escapes its heat.”

Psalms 19:1-7

Pictured above: "Runner and Spring Lupines", by Phil Dynan