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.

Who are you, really?

This afternoon saw me going with a few friends to see some local acts play at the Northcote Social Club, as part of a single launch for a friend's band. The artists were all wonderful and it was a great afternoon, the first time that I've been back to one of my favourite northern haunts since returning to Australia a year ago.

The second act, a seven-piece country sensation, were particularly striking, all in their chequered shirts, skinny legs and boots, singing songs about God, guns and midnight trains. There was nothing original about them but what they did they did marvellously. But, as one of the friends I went with pointed out, there's something a little insincere about guys who live in Northcote wearing boots that have never seen the countryside singing about experiences they've never had and never will. And I wonder how many of them actually believed in God. When they sang about Him, it had the ring to it of a stylistic trope rather than a profession of faith. It was simply in the genre to sing about Him.

It drew to my attention, I suppose, how often we simply fit into playing parts in our lives - parts that we pull off quite effectively but parts nonetheless. We may indeed look the real thing quite well, until we encounter someone who knows the real thing well enough to show to us that we sure aren't it.

Searching our own hearts, finding what is true in us and what is false, is a mightily difficult job. I for one can't do it. I'm happy enough to laugh at others being faux-country, for instance, because I feel that, in my heart, I'm the real thing. After all, I've spotted a fake, haven't I? Therefore I can't be fake myself, surely.

Oh, how wrong we are.

The truth is, the only one who can search our hearts properly is God, and it's a pretty scary prospect to think of bringing our hearts before Him. Anyone who thinks that praying is simply an act of wish-fulfilment and double think doesn't know the human heart. Coming to God, truly coming to Him, is often the last thing that our hearts desire. It takes a lot of humility, and humility just ain't something we feel like acquiring.

It's easy to play the part of being a Christian, to do all the outwardly Christian things, but open-hearted, repentant, ongoing prayer is quite another thing. I don't think you can fake something like that. It cuts to the heart of human duplicity.

What was the question again?

I'm not normally much of a thriller-fan when it comes to movies, but Doug Liman's recent based-on-a-true-story pic, "Fair Game", starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn grabbed me mostly because the people involved in it made it worth a look. The film deals with the scandal involving CIA operative Valerie Plame-Wilson (Watts) and her husband US Ambassador Joe Wilson (Penn). When Joe is employed by the CIA to investigate an allegation that the Iraqi government is sourcing materials for MDIs from Niger, he finds nothing to support this allegation. Thus, when the US government publicly declares that evidence of such activity HAS been found and uses this to justify the decision to go to war with Iraq, Wilson goes public to discredit the government's claims. The result of this move is that government workers expose Wilson's wife's identity as a CIA operative, in an attempt to make his evidence seem invalid, disgracing both Wilson and his wife in the process.

There is a wonderful moment late in the film when Wilson is addressing a group of students to expose what has taken place. A trick, he declares, has been played on the American public. In revealing his wife's identity, the issue has shifted from the flawed basis for the war in Iraq to questions of his and his wife's integrity:

"How did the question move from 'Why are we going to war?' to 'Who is that man's wife?' I asked the first question. Someone else asked the second. It worked. Its still working. Because we still don't know the truth. But you all know my wife's name."

Something similar, I think, can often happen to us when we are attempting to tackle the big issues of religious faith, but instead get distracted by minute details that are really not important. It happens to me all the time. And the worst thing is that it keeps us circling around the same point and not progressing - that, or we fail to see what the issue really is.

That happened to me this morning. I was reading the story in 1 Kings 10-11, which tells of the great wealth of King Solomon, and then his apostasy from God, caused by his multitudes of foreign wives. Now, the story should have been a salient lesson. Solomon, the story tells us, was the wisest man on earth at the time. He was a great and powerful king, not because he was great or powerful in himself but because he knew better than any other person that "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom". He began there, and wisdom came next, and with it greatness and power. Then we see the trajectory that, though perhaps unique in its specifics, is relevant to most believers: we may not be tempted to marry a thousand women, but we will all have that something which gradually comes between us and God until it is a veritable wall dividing us. And we can start off so well. But without caution, without a healthy continued fear of the Lord, it could happen to any of us.

But this was not what I thought about when I read that passage this morning. I thought things like, "1000 wives - that's rather a lot. Clearly exaggeration." Or I thought, "Isn't it strange that, given all of Solomon's greatness and splendour, there is no evidence of him as a king outside of the Bible?"

Well, these are important questions to ask, and they do have their answers, if you look for them. That's not the point. The point is that, when you always ask these questions - questions which serve to discredit the Bible when you most need to trust it - then you never get properly fed. You also never get to the real truth, the truth that matters most.

Valerie and Joe Wilson had a powerful government trying to undermine their witness. We too have a force opposing us. It's subtle, invisible, and deadly. For me, it takes on the appearance of a calm, measured intellectual. It will look quite different for you. But the effect is invariably the same. Wherever we should go, whatever questions we should ask, whatever issues we should concern ourselves with, it will do its best to ensure that we go elsewhere. And it can happen when we least expect it. It can happen to the wisest, and the best, among us.

Many notes, one song

Often, in the busyness of everyday life, I find that I either become too single-focused or too busy to keep track ofall the many different strands of life. Though quite different in their effect, each problem leads to the same core result: an inability to appreciate life fully. Either we are overwhelmed by multiplicity or ground to a halt by reductionism. It can damage our relationships: think of the times when, tired, you begin to obsess over the minute details of a conversation gone wrong, instead of seeing momentary thoughtlessness in the broader context of a rich and satisfying relationship. And it can damage our ideals: once we get caught up in living out our ideals, we can easily lose sight of what we first believed in. Picking at theminute details pulls apart the great fabric that once inspired us.

I have found this to be very true in my studies of the Bible. Many theology students will, I'm sure, testify that it is all too easy to become distracted by academic minutiae (was that particular verse really written by Paul?; why did people believe for so long that Song of Songs was written by Solomon, when it probably wasn't?...) that you lose sight of the (much more important) big picture. The small issues can be important but are rarely as important as we think. Nor are they the make-or-break issues that we turn them into. The adage about not being able to see the wood for the trees carries more truth than we often recognise.

Mercifully, God has made life sufficiently rich that we are forced to look at the big picture, at least from time to time. You can't learn right doctrine from looking at a magnificent mountain or hearing a sweeping orchestral movement, but you can be ripped out of your tunnel-vision into a sense of awe that takes you right out of yourself. We need to remember that the same God who created the Bible also created mountains and symphonies. He also created our minds and hearts to feel awe. It all works together in His plan.

Liberal theology comes from focusing on creation more than the creator. Blinkered theology comes from focusing on theology more than the creator. Neither is particularly healthy. So I for one will guard against my standard "bogged-down" perspective. I'll take a walk. I'll listen to some beautiful music. I'll rejoice in laughter and good friendship. None of these, when held in their right place, will lead me astray, though by themselves they are not enough. But God holds it all together - so I will focus on Him and let His fullness put everything in perspective.

Fighting For Breath

I used to be quite a grouch when I was younger. One symptom of this was that I hated movies which you could describe as "inspirational". You know the sort: the ones ending with either a slow clap, an "Oh Captain, my Captain" moment, or sometimes both. I don't know why I hated these so much. You could say I found them overly sentimental, that life didn't really have these moments, blah-blah-blah. Then I saw a few genuinely inspirational movies and found that, sometimes, being inspired by a movie was a good thing.

There's still remnants of this old grouchiness in me, and some of it may be justified I suppose. I hate it, for instance, when iTunes describe Christian music as "Inspirational", regardless of actual genre. But I'm starting to see that, even when such terms are used as meaningless labels, we can wear them as badges of honour. I think I first began to realise this when I saw an old first-aid poster which used the word "inspiration" as the opposite of "expiration": meaning, of course, to breathe in. Which is basically what the word means: to take in breath. And who can possibly think that taking in breath is a bad thing?

In the Christian life, this is particularly important. It's very easy to think that, when you become a Christian, you breathe in once and then you're set for life. Most of us would at least accept that we need to breathe in once a week (we call that "Church"), and some of us breathe some mornings or evenings (we call that "Quiet Time"). But we still more or less believe that, once you're a Christian, your spiritual walk is a done deal. Yet there are far too many people I know who were once Christians and aren't any more to think that this could possibly be the case. I know all the theological debates, and it is a complex topic, but at the simplest level this is what I think happens - they stop breathing. I've found the temptation to do this in my own life far more strongly than I ever expected. And why ever would we do that? Why would we ever stop breathing? Because breathing is a reflex that we take for granted, and then sometimes it becomes harder than we think - when under pressure, when afraid, when hurried. Most of us do it at least occasionally - think of the phrases "shortness of breath" or "hyperventilating". And so we can do this spiritually just as much as we can physically. The spiritual version is every bit as dangerous as the physical version - more dangerous, because Christ is the source of all life, and being cut off from this is to be cut off from all kinds of life, however the outside may appear.

Think for a moment about the word "inspiration". Look at what word it comes from: "spirit". That's because, in Latin, "spiritus" can mean "spirit" as we understand it, as well as "breath" or "wind". Then look at the Biblical words for the same thing: "ruach" (Hebrew) and "pneuma" (Greek). They also, bizarrely, have that same double-meaning: spirit, and breath/wind. If you know anything about language, and know that Latin, Greek and Hebrew have remarkably little linking them together, you will be amazed to see that this link between breath and spirit is at the very core of the word we use to describe each. So to live without inspiration is not to live.

It's tempting, I know, to stop fighting for breath. It's a temptation that, right now, I face daily. But I won't stop fighting, because the moment I do, my life ends. So let's commit everyday - to be inspired. Read the Bible, pray, talk to other believers, be inspired by the life stories of other believers. But never stop being inspired by God. Never stop breathing Him in.