almost there
About a mile out, the runner begins to hear the finish. When all he can see is still just road–that sunlit glint in the asphalt, those weather-worn and faded lines, the gravel and litter and patches of grass, the bib pinned to another runner’s shirt–he begins to hear first the music with its dull boom. That boom thunders every time he puts down his foot, as though the earth itself has begun to shudder in anticipation. He has watched those mile markers tick up for the last six miles; has slashed right through them, wincing over a persistent cramp in his calf. His lips taste like salt, like that same sweat dripping off of his elbow, dotting the road like crumbs, or maybe, blood.
“I’m going to finish; I’ve got to finish,” he says to himself, even though what he really wants to do is stop still right there in the road.
I remember sitting in our old friend’s living room, talking to him in the last miles. His legs, bruised and long since done with running, stuck out a little beneath a blanket. The blanket was blue, like the sky. His legs still looked like runner’s legs; his muscles still curved with their memory of the road. “You know, I’ll be okay when it’s my time,” he said, sitting with us and yet miles away, staring down the center line of some invisible road. Focusing, he quoted frankly the scripture from Hebrews, “….as it is appointed unto man once to die, but after this the judgment…” The worn Elizabethan syllables slid easily off his tongue and over his thin lips, gravelly only because of his parched voice. He’d touched these words thousands of times, felt their shape with his own fingers. The syllables fell away at the end like the last echoing stones in an avalanche, the passage unfinished.
We held out the emblems, placing them in each other’s hands. Silently, he took up the small square of bread, the Eucharist feast Kevin offered him, and dropped it on his tongue. He had little more to say. What comes next is only Christ.
“Come home,” Adam groans this morning, lifting his book bag. He jerked on his socks; they cover over the hem of his jeans.
“Fix your pants,” I say, gesturing toward Adam’s ankles. A friend of mine tells me Adam just says what the rest of us are thinking. I smile, reaching to lightly squeeze the back of my son’s neck as he roughly pulls out his jeans. Flat weary Friday, and staring down another how-in-the-world day, I remember our old friend, rounding the bend on his life. We run long races and short ones; living is full of finishes.
“I know,” I tell my son, gently. “You’re almost there. Just one more day.” Adam looks up at me, grabs me with those sharp, bright eyes, but he doesn’t smile. Last miles hurt. Today, I feel them too. Run to win the prize, Paul wrote (1 Corinthians 9:24). I take a deep breath, thinking about the discipline we all need to bring things to completion–those eager dreams, those uncomfortable callings, even just the week. In every sort of race, we face the temptation to quit. Sometimes in the middle of the day, I want to lay down of the floor and just not.
For a while, the runner practices all his mantras. He sings victory shrilly in his head. Then, he starts counting to distract himself from the pain, that sore wondering about how much longer. And then, just as he begins to discern a rhythm to that music in the distance, he hears the low mumble of a voice, calling the finishers by name. It’s something, he remembers, to finish. He hears—just faintly—the sound of cheering. He smiles, thinking of his own crowd leaning lightly against the taut tape that marks out the sides of the chute. He imagines the arch, sees in his mind’s eye that word he’ll run–yes, run–under: Finish. He can almost feel the weight of the medal they’ll slide around his neck, the one identifying him not just as a runner but as a finisher.
Our old friend lifted the cup, that day in his living room, draining it carefully. I wondered in the pregnant silence if he wandered through the rest of the passage he’d begun, the parts he left unsaid—if he thought of the race, the crowd; if, tasting the tang of that bruised juice, he’d seen Jesus carefully marking out the course. Suddenly remembering us, our friend flicked his glance toward us and smiled. It was not the smile of a man in pain; it was the joy of a man with hope. “Well,” he said simply, “thank you.” He seemed genuinely grateful and yet deeply absorbed in an echo of something we couldn’t quite hear. We took our leave; we left him to focus on the unseen, to hum that phrase we’d heard as we walked through the door, that melody of triumph.
Riley walks into the kitchen now, just as I’ve taken up our old friend’s song, humming it in my heart. Hearing her brother’s groan, she’s come to stream victory over the speaker on the bar. It’s a different song, one born of her own generation, but it tells the same story. Perseverance teaches us to worship, because worship is the thriving sound of the finish. Sometimes, it’s all we can do to help each other hear hope.
…Gotta get that fire, fire, back in my bones
Before my heart, heart, turns into stone…And I choose joy
Let it move you, let it move you…
Joy, For King and Country
I pick up Adam’s hands and begin to dance. “3 o’clock, Adam. School’s over at 3.”
He’s close, so he focuses on the pins crookedly holding that other runner’s bib in place. She turns, as if she can feel him looking. She offers him a limp smile. “Hey,” she says, “we’re almost there. It’s just around that bend.” And then, she starts humming victory, loud enough for him to hear, loud enough for him to take up the song. This, he thinks, is why it’s so much better not to run alone.
“You can do it, Adam Jones,” Riley says, dancing a jagged semi-circle around him, throwing her arms up and down in exaggerated drum beats. “Tomorrow is the weekend!”
“Yes,” he says simply, grinning, withdrawing his hands from mine.
I watch Adam walk out the door toward the day, and I think again of our old friend and his hopeful smile, of the way we talked that afternoon in his living room, of the way we placed the emblems in each other’s hands like tokens of the truth. In 1 Thessalonians 4, while finishing his own race, Paul wrote perseverance with his own bruised hands, sentence upon sentence about the finish, and then, “encourage one another with these words (18).” It seems as though we were always meant to help each other home.
