witnesses

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us (Hebrews 12:1).

The night before my first half marathon, I had a dream:

Twenty minutes late, and a panicked feeling jars me awake.  I’m not sure where we slept, not in our room, but somewhere beside the race course.  From the window, I see other runners loping down a winding path, wearing their racing bibs, the numbers blurring in my sleep-fog.  My friend sits outside in her car, waiting to take me to the start. I think of her sitting there, checking her watch, wondering.  My anxiety paralyzes her, silent, not alerting me as she would have.  My sleepy worrying renders her only a quiet partner in my mistake.  But still, the race shouldn’t have started yet, I think, shaking off incredulity, confused, watching the runners from the window, trying to work my mind around catching up to them. I want to propel myself through the glass, to jump out there on the course.  The dream makes me think perhaps I can, if I leap.  What’s to be done?  I’m just asking it, just turning to nudge Kevin, when Matthew West’s voice breaks in, shattering all this nervous fiction.

You must, you must think I’m strong, to give me what I’m going through…He sings to God, reminding me: I don’t have to be strong enough.  YHWH, Elohim, God Almighty, He is strong enough.  My alarm, the real one.  I wake to that song every morning.

5 am and I put on my running clothes, lace up my shoes, sit with Kevin in the quiet to eat breakfast—steel cut oats I cooked overnight in the slow cooker—for fuel; these days eating means energy.  He asks if I am nervous, and I’m surprised to say no.  I don’t feel it, at least not in the usual ways.  But, the dream.  All my anxiety simmers deep below the surface, a hidden fire that makes me want to launch.  “It’s just another long run,” I tell him, “but in a different place, and with other people running too.” My brother had told me I needed to race.  He’d said the atmosphere super-charged everything, and that’s the part I couldn’t have anticipated.  I don’t think I really understood the power of witnesses, how much we need them.

“I wish I could be there the whole time,” Kevin said.  “It doesn’t feel right somehow, not to be.”  He and the kids would meet me there at the end, in time to see me cross the finish line.  But it seemed too much to have the kids there waiting for two hours, and too difficult to have them ready to go so early.  His support feels like a strong arm wrapped around my shoulder.  I will feel him with me, the way I always do, but it means everything that he wants to be there physically, that he knows how important this is to me.  I had decided, once a while ago, that my body would not let me run, and now I stand slipping gels in my pocket for my first race.

One of my best friends arrives early to drive me to the start, a friend who doesn’t run and says, mostly as a joke, that she doesn’t really understand that part of me.  But the truth is that she does get it, even if she doesn’t channel her own passion in exactly that way.  At some point I look over at her beside me, driving, and I thank her for being there, and she says,

“It’s important to me because it’s important to you.  I don’t have to understand it completely.”

My friend parks and together we walk to the knot of runners gathering.  She keeps smiling at me, all bright light, and finally she says, “I am so glad I get to be here with you.”

At the starting line, music thrumps, sending its vibrations through my legs, my arms.  A lady with a microphone welcomes, celebrating the race, thanking participants.  She awaits another start behind this one.  The 5K runners begin a half hour later.

Again, I feel the impulse to launch, the energy bubbling low.  It’s time.  I’m doing this, I think.  And as I call, “See ya,” smiling,  and I leave my dear friend standing there beside the road in the brisk morning, I know she’ll be there at the end, watching for me, tracking me as I race.  And I am so thankful.  Gratitude bubbles up with the energy surging.  We all need this—to know someone sits by, someone pays attention, someone waits.

In that moment, I know, I’m thinking it as I begin to run and breathe, that this is the reason for the church.  We have never been the building in which we gather, nor the specific group from which we borrow a name, nor the sum total of our sometimes eccentric interpretations of scripture.  Together, we are witnesses bound by the One who is, was, and is to come; witnesses to all that He has done, to kingdom now, to the it is finished that will draw the pause of heaven.  We need each other, the racing together, the cheering one another on, because we see in each other the things that He has accomplished.  So we gather together at the start; we wait for each other at the finish.

I run the first ten minutes with hardly a glance at a my watch, falling into a good pace, taking in the details—quiet morning, wide road, green of leaves, blue sky. Not even a full mile along, I pass a dad and daughter waving signs, clapping, calling, “Way to go, runner!  You’re off to a great start!  Looking good!”  A policeman points the way with one hand, standing in the middle of a road that usually gets a fair amount of traffic.  This morning, one whole side is blocked off for the race.  “Congratulations!  Good job,” the policeman calls over and over as we pass, our feet thumping the pavement, our muscles hot, energy surging.

The first two miles bring us back the way we started, and I see my friend sitting beside the road, wearing a red shirt the same shade as the one I wear to run.  She sits not far from another woman, who leans and says something to my friend after she notices our waving, and then calls my name, this woman who doesn’t know me, cheering for me, urging me on.  All along the way, I encounter groups of people standing along the road just to encourage runners.  In some of the neighborhoods, families gather on their front steps with coffee mugs in their hands, calling out best wishes as we pass.  “You can do it!  Go, Go!” A little girl yells happily, jumping a little as she calls out.  At certain points, volunteers hand out water and energy drinks, while others pull big brooms back along the side of the road, gathering discarded cups.  And in the last four miles, voices spur us on with details we need.  “Just three more little ones to go,” one cheerful woman calls, while her cheering partner makes us laugh by running around in circles, out of breath and overdoing her struggling, pushing short-cropped silver hair off of her forehead with her hands.  Every time I pass a group cheering, I pick up my pace, somehow buoyed along by their enthusiasm, the simple declared belief that what we are about can and will be accomplished, that all is well.  How desperately we all need shared belief through the hardest parts of life, the heavy, weary days when our ordinary steps feel like running through mud.  Sometimes hearing someone say, “You’re doing so well!  Keep it up.  You can do it,” is all we have, all we need, all that pushes us through.

In the last mile and a half, I keep thinking of my kids and Kevin and my dear friend at the finish waiting for me, watching, looking for sight of me.  I imagine them all there, and I realize that I am now not simply racing but running to them.   I always sprint the last stretch of every run, but something about the race makes me still more determined to finish well.  My witnesses, these ones I love, they will see me sprint in, as hard as I can.  I think especially of my girls and the way they watch me, the way they absorb womanhood with every breath.  Be strong women, girls.  Be strong.

I shoot forward, the end in sight, looking for my family.  I pass a couple of guys and hear one mutter bitterly, something like, “Oh yea, way to go running like that the last 500 feet.”  It occurs to me that he might have finished several yards ahead of me had he also decided to sprint, but the thought vanishes in an instant as I see my kids, my husband, my friend standing in the center of the crowd just beyond the finish line.  Kevin’s shirt is red—red for me, and I know this. It makes me smile.  Zoe chose red as our family color when we walked the diabetes walk last year.  I run to them, smiling at them, and a lady congratulates me, slipping a medal over my head as I allow myself, finally, to stop.

The race over–it is finished, I feel joy and nothing else.  The muscles in my legs twitch and tremble, but I hardly feel tired.  I lift my hand and Adam gives me five in the air, and then looks at his palm and wipes the sweat off on his shorts.

And for a fleeting moment I think,

So this must be some tiny fraction of how it feels to finish, at the end, to run at last breath to those you love, the “great cloud of witnesses” waiting just beyond;

and red, our family color, the way we’ll all be clothed with Him;

and then, not a medal but a crown, a crown to cast at the Victor’s feet;

and His voice the first sound, wrapping the runner with joy.