Running for joy

I am considering retitling this blog "Matt's Running Adventures". This will be, I believe, the third post I have written about running in little over a week. It may seem a tad obsessive, until you consider a few things. Discovering a new hobby, at any age or stage of life, is an exciting thing. The older you get, the less common it is to discover a new love. I'm not old by any means, but I'm old enough to be fairly set in my ways, fairly fixed in what I think I like and don't like. It's a nice feeling to have those fixed ideas shaken up.

But there's more to it than that. You see, running has, unexpectedly, brought joy into a life that, for some time now, has not abounded in joy. On Wednesday night, for instance, I came home feeling truly terrible, the worst case of the winter commuter blues that I've had in a while. So what did I do when I got home? I ran. It was late, it was dark, I hadn't had any dinner, but I ran. As I set off down the inner-suburban streets near my house - it was too dark to run along Merri Creek - I wondered why I was doing this. It seemed ridiculous. Shouldn't I be resting? Shouldn't I be recovering from a challenging day? No. I ran. And when I came home, something had changed. It's hard to say what. None of my problems were solved. But the darkness of my head as I had driven home was gone. My head was clear.

So I was unsurprised to hear my sister tell me today that running can help combat mild depression. I'm weary of self-diagnosis, but the term "mild depression" seems to fit my state of the past 12 months or so - sometimes going beyond mild - and running has been one of the best things that I've done to combat it.

The idea is confirmed in this article from BBC News, and a few other places that appeared when I googled "running depression". And what is the reason for this link? Well, at a physiological level running releases endorphins - happy chemicals which our bodies and minds need for our well-being. Sitting in a car in the dark driving from Brunswick to Werribee and back each day, I suspect, releases fewer endorphins than running. I doubt, as a matter of fact, if it releases any. So, looking purely at the chemistry of it, it makes sense that running would make you feel better.

But there are other reasons. Biologist Professor Lewis Wolpert is quoted as crediting running with helping him overcome severe depression because it gives him "time to quietly think". For me, running does nothing of the sort. I hear my heart pounding in my ears; I struggle over each mound; I let the songs streaming into my ears help me up and down each crest and round each corner. The best thing, for me, about running is that I don't think. And that, for a chronic over-thinker like myself, is a very good thing.

I accidentally mistyped "good" as "god", and, while I corrected the mistake, I think it was more meaningful than your average typo. I think that running and not thinking is also a God thing. You see, with His creation on either side of me, His wind blowing into my sweaty face, His strength powering my weak feet (I pray before each run that His strength will sustain me), I feel Him in a way that I never will sitting anxiously behind a steering wheel. I also trust in Him in a way that I never otherwise do. It's a powerful experience, and one that I have trouble explaining. But I think that a quote from the classic film Chariots of Fire goes some way to expressing how it feels. Says Eric Liddell, the great sprinter and Christian missionary:

I believe God made me for a purpose, but He also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.

I'm not sure He made me quite so fast, but He has shown me a joy when I run that I don't feel at other times. When I run, I too feel His pleasure.

Restitution and Offsetting

How do we assuage our guilt? It's an important question. The Catholic church told us to wallow in our guilt. Self-condemnation, it seemed, was the way to atone for sins we could never undo. The Freudians told us guilt was an immature response to our lives and something we needed to overcome for the sake of psychological health.

These days, we don't seem to know at all. We go for runs to deal with our guilt over eating that extra piece of cake. We offset our carbon emissions to atone for an overseas flight. And then we tell ourselves to not feel bad. It isn't our fault. We're only human. We've all got to live a little.

*

8 But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”

9 Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. 10 For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” (Luke 19:8-10)

Zaccheus could never have done anything to make up for his guilt. He could never have been accepted by a society that resented the crimes he had committed. He could never have broken out of the cycle of guilt and indulgence that trapped him. But Jesus called out to him and said, "Zaccheus, come down from that tree." And thus began a transformed life. The first thing he did was pay back those he had cheated.

*

3 When Judas, who had betrayed him, saw that Jesus was condemned, he was seized with remorse and returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. 4 “I have sinned,” he said, “for I have betrayed innocent blood.”

“What is that to us?” they replied. “That’s your responsibility.”

5 So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself. (Matthew 27:3-5)

Judas saw the best of all men hanging on a tree and knew he had put Him there. He looked at the silver in his hands. He looked at the perfect blood smeared all across it. There was nothing he could do. Giving the money back would never bring back the life he had betrayed. Hanging himself on a tree could never take away his guilt either. But he could see no choice.

*

A man sits at the entrance to Lygon Street. A scrawled note on a piece of cardboard sits in front of an icecream container with a few odd coins sitting in it, the sort of coins I consider a nuisance. The sort I would throw away if I could.

I have no money in my hands, only the books I just bought from Readings. The man blocks my path, and his needs cloud my happy Saturday mood. I glance at his face. I do not know what to do. Maybe I'll beat myself up over it, tell myself I suck, that I'm another Western hypocrite, that I need to be more compassionate, more giving, less selfish. Maybe I'll go home and donate to a charity to offset my guilt. Better than that, maybe I'll fall on my knees before the perfect one who already bled for my every moment of hypocrisy. And what will He say to me, when I kneel there? "I forgive you. Now go and do what you know is right."

He has shown you what is good, O man. And He knows that you will forever fail to do it. Rise every day. Pray that this time you will do what you are called to. Cling to the grace that forgives you every time you fail.

An open letter to Rebecca Black

(Inspired by reading this related post on a friend's blog...)

Dear Rebecca,

You don't know me, and I certainly don't know you. Having watched your first music video and made fun of it does not count as knowing you. But that's the thing about celebrity - it creates a false sense of familiarity. We all know your face and your voice, and we know what time you wake up in the morning. Many people even feel they know you well enough to make comments on your video that discount you as a human being, not just as a singer or songwriter. And that's certainly something they had no right to say, and no basis for saying it.

We could say that you asked for it, by choosing to put your music out there for the world to see. We could say that aiming at celebrity brings with it the chance that as many people will hate you as love you. And yet that seems to be a little like saying that those who visit war-zones deserve to be killed. The truth is that the comments people have written on your video have been truly ugly, so ugly that the video keeps being removed and then re-uploaded as a semi-effective means of controlling the hatred. At least the record of hate gets occasionally deleted, only to be replaced by more, and the occasional plea for goodwill, and sometimes, just sometimes, a comment that says, "I actually like this song..."

But it isn't just those who have hated it - and you - openly that have shown an ugliness in humanity. It's also those of us who have delighted in mocking it. The number of parodies now far outweighs the original versions available on YouTube - it now takes a concerted effort to find the real thing amidst all the mocking imitations and ironic cover versions. I watched a few and laughed. I participated in the mockery as much as most respectable Gen-Yers did. I can't apologise on their behalf, but I can say that I am sorry. You don't deserve this. If your courting of fame has left much to be desired, that doesn't excuse us for our ridicule. We were always taught in school that bullies make fun of others to feel better about themselves. We were always taught this was low. It isn't any lower when you bully someone you can't see. It isn't lower when the person you bully is also an overnight celebrity.

The truth is, I don't know if you are old enough to reflect on this whole situation in a way that will edify and not destroy you. Your latest video seems to suggest that you are fighting those who hate you by trying to prove them wrong. Perhaps you shouldn't fight them; perhaps you should just take away their fuel, by ignoring them and getting on with being a teenage girl. But then almost no girl your age is content to just be herself, and we have not helped, by telling you how worthless that self is. We have never been in any position to judge.

What is saddest, perhaps, is that a song with so much youthful innocence about it - a song where the hardest choice of the week is whether to sit in the front seat or the back - should have inspired death threats and online vendettas. I guess you can't go back to that world now, can you? But hopefully, with time, you can be wiser, and hopefully humanity, by the grace of the God I believe in, will see for itself the evil that it does, again and again, every time it picks on the weakest to make itself feel stronger.

Yours sincerely,

Ideas From the North.

What I write about when I write about running

I've never been one for athletic metaphors for life or the Christian experience. They've always left me cold, to be honest, partly because they're cliched, but mostly because I'm no athlete. I can relate to them about as much as someone born in the Ghobi Desert can relate to "The Little Mermaid". Maybe a little bit more since I have actually seen an athlete before, but now we're just splitting hairs.

The point is that typically, when I hear people talking about how something or other is like a marathon, my eyes tend to glaze over almost as quickly as they do when people try to explain economics or sub-prime thingummies. But, being Australian, I'm in the minority, I realise. Besides, people who use athletics as a metaphor for Christian life are in good company. After all, Paul did just that, drawing on the strong Greek athletic tradition (the very word "athlete" is Greek in origin) when he wrote to the church in Philippi:

Forgetting what is behind me and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:13-14)

He also wrote to his protege Timothy:

If anyone competes as an athlete, he does not receive the victor's crown unless he competes according to the rules. (2 Timothy 2:5)

And, in a famous closing remark on his ministry drawing to an end he wrote:

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. (2 Timothy 4:7)

So I suppose I should feel rebuked for my dislike of these kinds of metaphors. The fact is, Paul may not have been much of an athlete himself, but he saw in the kind of strength and perseverance that an athlete must show a helpful metaphor for what it is like to persevere in the faith.

Today, going on my second longish-distance run in three days, I feel qualified to make all kinds of comments on running as a metaphor for "going the distance" as a Christian. The fact is, I am neither qualified to speak about running nor about going the distance. My running career leaves much to be desired, and I am too young to say that I have gone the distance. Still, running in cold weather, rain and over a muddy, hilly track, with my muscles still sore from two days ago, I made a few observations that I will finish with here:

1) If I have any intention of making a fist of this running habit, I will need to do it even on days like today, when I had much rather not.

2) Being gung-ho is not the same as persevering. Persevering requires sustainability. So I need to be willing to spend some time doing the same thing - running the same distance, the same place - to build up my strength and stamina, before I rush into something else. Looking after my body is an important part of training it to be stronger.

3) The extreme muddiness of the track today made it necessary for me to slow down, even walk, to avoid slipping. We need to be willing to slow down when the track is unsafe or unstable.

4) We then also need to be willing to run whenever the track allows us to. You might think that slowing down at the muddy points would have helped me get up my energy to run the rest of the time, but it wasn't so easy. Slowing down made me more inclined to stop; I had to push myself to run the rest of the time.

5) Persevering through a difficult run like today will not be enough to make me magically able to persevere for the rest of my life. There are no magical bullets or defining experiences that make perseverance easy. Perseverance can only happen over time, and with great persistence.

It isn't very profound, I'm afraid, and I may well find that, in a few weeks or months, I'm no longer running. But I hope that I can continue, not only for the sake of the running itself but for what it will teach me about discipline and perseverance.

I must remember that perseverance is not easy in any area, whether in running or in faith, and we will rarely make it to the finish-line looking calm and dignified. But Jesus does not require that, when I get to the end, I look anything other than faithful and persistent. He only requires that I make it to the end. And that certainly is my aim.

Shoes of readiness, heart of reluctance

This afternoon, energised by a literacy day in Preston - a much shorter drive from my house than I normally have during the week - I decided to buy myself some running shoes. I've talked about buying running shoes for some time now - let's just say that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. In Malaysia, I would just run barefoot or with sandals (they called them "slippers"), until I sprained my ankle - an unrelated incident - and my running career was cut short. Then I returned to Australia and it was winter and I was broke, and one thing led to another year of indifferent slumber from exercise, until we're where we are now.

But this week I requested my church small group to keep me accountable with buying running shoes AND actually using them, and this, combined with the fresh mind I had and the sunnier weather, prompted me to go to Northland and buy an affordable pair of blindingly white runners, and on returning home I set off with my runners, my iPod armed with a playlist of songs designed to spur me on and delight me, and off I went down Albion St towards Merri Creek, unable to see very clearly but happy enough with the blur of trees, long, green grass and the creek to my right.

There were some hills to climb and some mud which reduced the blinding whiteness of my shoes, and while I ran steadily for the first half, the second half saw me alternating between running and walking. A fairly constant stitch for the last few 10 or so minutes made me slow down, though I felt motivated when Josh Garrels' "Resistance" came on, and I found myself speeding up like the eternal spiritual war of good and evil depended upon it.

Yet when I came back to Albion Street, and the song changed, I stopped and took the final stretch at a slower pace. As I surmounted my street - the last hill before home - this song, also by Josh Garrels, filled my ears, and comforted me until, with perfect timing, I reached my door, and it ended.

These words in particular struck me as I walked through the front gate to my house:

"Not by my might, or my power, or by the strength of swords

Only through your love, my Lord.

All we've lost will be restored."

Yes, the spirit is willing, and today the flesh co-operated. We'll see if it happens again. But praise God for His strength in weakness, and praise Him for the beauty of a peaceful afternoon jogging in Brunswick, and the cool breeze on my face, and the knowledge that one day we will rise hill after hill and not grow tired.