analogies on Running from Your Problems

In 1890 Francis Thompson, a Roman Catholic poet, described God as “The Hound of Heaven”:  I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;  I fled Him, down the arches of the years;  I fled Him,...

On May 20, 1990, 42-year-old Georgene Johnson arrived 15 min early for her 10K race (6.2 mi) as part of the Revco-Cleveland Marathon and found runners already heading down the course. So, she jumped i...

I learned a long time ago that if I hustle fast enough, the emptiness will never catch up with me. First I outran it by traveling and dancing and drinking two-for-one whiskey sours at Calypso on State...

At the 5-mile mark in the Old Kent Riverbank Run a guy passing me said, “Hey buddy, you dropped your key.” There was no getting home without my key. Like a salmon swimming upstream I headed back into ...

We want everyone around us to believe we have it all together—and we don’t. We fear everyone else is living the lives they post and we are the only imposters. And so, the race is on. The race to perfe...

In a 1995 edition of The Orange County Register, a professor at McMaster University in Ontario described famed physicist Albert Einstein’s approach to solving the apocalypse: “When Einstein was asked ...

You fear you won’t. We all do. We fear that the depression will never lift, the yelling will never stop, the pain will never leave…We wonder: Will this gray sky ever brighten ? This load ever lighten...

Living in a society governed by technique conditions us to believe that in every way life is easier than it ever has been. Technique is the use of rational methods to maximize efficiency, and we...

I love golf. If only it loved me in return. Alas, it is a one-sided romance. My golf swing is the stuff that keeps an instructor awake at night. One kindly compared it to an octopus falling from a tre...

Sometimes we have to “step over” our anger, our jealousy, or our feelings of rejection and move on. The temptation is to get stuck in our negative emotions, poking around in them as if we belong there...

If you think of a problem as being like a medieval walled city, then a lot of people will attack it head-on, like a battering ram. They will storm the gates and try to smash through the defenses with ...

“Thirty years ago,” Anne Lamott writes in her book Bird by Bird, “my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. ...

Recently I’ve wondered about the connection between the English words “longing” and “belonging”. Isn’t belonging one of our greatest longings in life? Don’t we all have some deep, inner desire t...

Get to know someone really well, and almost without fail, you will discover a person who routinely struggles to get out of bed in the morning. And not just because they’re tired. They can’t get out of...

I can’t help but recall here a scene from The West Wing. White House chief of staff Leo McGarry reaches out to his deputy, Josh Lyman, who is struggling with PTSD. Leo tells him a parable: This guy’...

In his highly book, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith shares the importance of finding balance, even as life seems to pull us in different directions: Overextending yourself is stretching your physic...

We all go through desert seasons and have the opportunity to determine how we will respond. The cyclical frustrations I faced in regard to my desire for control, fear, and the longing to feel chosen w...

I recently heard a story about a race in which one runner had a significant lead over the rest of the field. As the man rounded the final turn, the crowd roared as he inched closer and closer to the f...

In her book Confessions of a Beginning Theologian , Elouise Renich Fraser discusses how crucial it has been to listen to her body throughout her personal and theological growth. My body, once...

Holy One, there is something I wanted to tell you but there have been errands to run, bills to pay, arrangements to make, meetings to attend, friends to entertain, washing to do . . . and I for...

When I think of the way God allows His servants to suffer, I can’t help but remember the classic story of poor Jack, who was out jogging. As he passed a cliff, he got a little too close to the edge, a...

On several occasions I have known the name of the victor before the end of the contest. Being a pastor, I’m often unable to watch the Sunday football games. While I am preaching, the teams are playing...

I am not a mountain climber, but a few years ago I had the idea that I might want to climb seriously, so I started to read and to train. I’ve climbed a few glacier-covered mountains in the northwester...

I actually want to believe that when it comes to communication, my biggest problem is outside of me, not inside of me. I want to think that it’s my kids, my wife, my neighbors, my boss. I want to thin...

The Land of What-Ifs is a tempting place to dwell. It is also a dangerous place to be. And chances are, if you flipped to this page, you’re stepping foot into its territory. Before you even pull the c...

The Barcelona Olympics of 1992 provided one of track and field’s most incredible moments. Britain’s Derek Redmond had dreamed all his life of winning a gold medal in the 400-meter race, and his dream...

In the sport of cycling, one of the most important things necessary to be successful in a race is the ability to manage the timing of when “to burn a match.” This is a phrase that all bike racers know...

This is in fact one of the many sharp edges of “the problem of evil.” Evil isn’t simply a philosophers’ puzzle but a reality which stalks our streets and damages people’s lives, homes and property. Th...

A climber recently had to be airlifted off Japan’s Mount Fuji due to altitude sickness. That alone would have been a dramatic enough story. But four days later—still recovering—he climbed back up ...

The renowned scholar and musician Albert Schweitzer’s life was turned upside down one summer morning in 1896 while reading his Bible. He came upon Matthew 16:25: “For whosoever will save his life shal...