But
Monday? I wanted to get a 10k in - six plus miles - because they were running
the Boston Marathon. It was cool and overcast when they called morning rec and
I headed out the back of the building and walked the quarter mile fenced path
to the track. I started the run, fell into a comfortable stride and thought and
prayed about life. Running, I’ve found, is a form of meditation. I feel closer
to God somehow when I propel myself forward and hear my breathing and feel my
heart.
It
was with those thoughts in mind that I watched albeit briefly, the news of the
bombings at the Boston Marathon. My mind remembered running a marathon in 1999
shortly after my fortieth birthday. I remembered that experience as I tried to
digest the news of a dead eight year old boy, killed by the explosion just
moments after he and his family watched friends complete the race.
1999
and I turned forty. At thirty-eight I’d become a father for the second time.
Our younger son was a handful, more rambunctious and demanding than his
older brother. There was even less time for my wife and I to be a couple. Work,
church, and now new family responsibilities pulled at both of us.
Forty
was a tough age. When I was twenty, I had my whole life ahead of me. I was one
of the top academic students at my small college. I had a myriad of choices
about my future: law school or graduate school. I knew everything (or so I
thought). I had dreams, long dreams of travel and writing and a life that
mattered. By forty, all those dreams were gone. You tell yourself those dreams
were just the foolish meanderings of a young man, but then you look at the grey
hair, the fleshier jowls, the slight paunch and you realize the guy who used to
run ten miles an hour is gone.
A
marathon. Then and there on my 40th birthday,
I decided I’d run a marathon. I’d never run more than twenty miles at one time.
I decided at forty I would run 26.2. It strained an already stressed marriage.
After all, I needed three hours each Saturday and Sunday to run fifteen to
twenty-five miles at a time. And. I started leaving for work even earlier to
get morning runs in. But I knew I needed to run those twenty six miles. My life
wasn’t what I’d imagined. I had started heading down a path that would
eventually put me in prison – and lead to a divorce and a whole host of other
results. At the time, in the circumstances I was in, I thought I understood the
risks. They were risks worth taking (at least I thought). But the marathon –
running that marathon I thought would restore my life, my dreams.
That
November, I ran my marathon on a cool, clear day. Truth be told, it was tough.
The first half was easy. The last six miles, I was dehydrated. My legs ached. I
wondered why I thought a run could change my life. And then it happened. I
turned onto the college campus where the race began and ended. I was a half
mile from the finish, just hanging on, and I saw him. It was my little boy,
just a few months over two, and he saw me and began running toward me with that
grinning, toothy smile he had. “Daddy,” I heard him giggle. Seeing him, hearing
him, suddenly made everything right with my world.
I
thought about that moment yesterday evening as I thought about a father being
greeted by his eight year old at the finish line. A smile from his son, a shout
of “Dad,” and then the horrible, awful reality of the bombing, and death, and
despair.
Prison.
This is a God-awful place. There are men I deal with daily who have committed
unspeakable acts. Murder and violence is as normal to them as breathing. Still,
maybe it’s my need to atone, but I try and see the humanity in them. And then
there is the father, and his son, and the marathon. The guys watch and they
call for vengeance. “Kill the bastards who did this. Blow up their kids.” An
eye for an eye. But, the father and the memory of that moment at the finish
with his precious son and runners in stride propelling them forward, and breathing,
and life … How does vengeance help that?
The
last few weeks I’ve been having a debate in my mind about two Bible passages.
For someone prone to a “realistic” view of life (that things happen, bad
things, and people suffer for no good reason), the passages make no sense. Of
course, so much of what God tells us doesn’t make much sense.
“This
is the day the Lord has made. Rejoice and be glad in it.” God makes every day.
But rejoice? Be glad? Even when your world is turning to hell? I should have
rejoiced on August 18, 2008, when I was arrested, led off in handcuffs, and
spent the first of many nights behind bars? How about September 5th?
Exactly twenty-nine years from the night of our first date, my wife’s complaint
for divorce was granted. Rejoice? Will the father cling to the memory of his
little boy or, will it be the aftermath?
“Rejoice
in the Lord always. Again, I say rejoice.” Impossible with all the turmoil, and
violence, and sadness in the world. Except, except the writer of those words
wrote them while imprisoned in conditions more barbaric than we who are locked
up today can imagine.
The
running life. The father of that little boy will run. Because it is in the run,
the breathing, the heartbeat as he goes forward that he will feel the presence of
his son. He will feel and he will remember the smile, the words. I know this to
be true.
We
focus so much on the retaliation, we forget the life. Violence begets violence;
anger begets anger. Kindness, mercy, forgiveness, they alone overcome. I think about
those things as I grapple with the violence all around me. Men who think they
are justified in their violence, both inside this prison and in the “real
world.”
And
I think of my marathon, the patience and endurance through pain and difficulty
until I turned and saw my young son and I knew, I knew love, and hope, and
peace. My prayer for the grieving father in Boston is that he, somehow, finds
that and he remembers on his runs to come and, in spite of it all, rejoices.
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