Today I ran 18 miles, something I was dreading a bit beforehand, so I asked my friend/roommate Kyle to pray for me. I’d prepared for the run in advance, I’ve worked my way up to the distance—12 miles last week and the week before I ran 16 miles, woke up 3 hours early to eat, so that I could have a full stomach to burn while going the distance, but still, all the preparation in the world didn’t mean that I wasn’t dreading the pain of going through with such ambition.
This past week at CGA, we’ve been receiving a wealth of information on the brain from a neuroscientist named Jerome. Three days of in depth neuroscience was amazing to cover, but one of the biggest take-aways that he gave us was about faith.
Hebrews 11:1 defines faith —“Now Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”
From that definition Jerome extrapolated faith as a belief or hope in something future tense—Therefore, faith is a thought, because to hope for something you have to think about it. Furthermore, every time we think a thought there is a physical change in the topography of our brains, and therefore whenever we think or consequently have faith a physical activity is taking place. If faith is a physical activity…then sometimes you just have to do it—like the swoosh says.
When Kyle prayed over me this morning my mind thought new thoughts, because I was renewed—my brain physically changed, and I grasped hold of hope. When you grasp onto hope—you change.
13 miles into the run I kept a pace around 7 minutes 20 seconds per mile, however, my last 5 miles proved to be my toughest. By my last mile I felt stomach pains, back pains, leg pains, ankle pains, and my legs wouldn’t move as far as they did before. With all the will I could muster I tried to push through, but all my limbs felt shackled.
Pain has a way of locking us up inside. Most of my life I’ve spent alone or hiding, because I didn’t know any better. My life was filled with a lot of difficult things, but mostly I lacked vision of what was worth fighting for.
Things began to change around 21, because God started talking to me. He had talked to me before, but never like this…out of the blue, and dealing with His relationship with me. He would whisper into my shamed ear two things. “You’re my son” and or “I love you” —gut reaction always kicked back— “NO! No you don’t!” or “That’s not true” “That’s just something—unreal, I’m talking to myself”
My brain was set in it’s topography.
Flash forward a year or two: I’m talking with my second girlfriend, and her eyes light up when she talks about heaven. She talks about it like it’s a place she’s been, and you can see her longing—she wants to be there—she knows it’s real. What she did for me was make me look into that hope—make me look into how her thoughts were real to her…because—as far as the brain is concerned,
perception is reality.
When I went on the World Race, I felt like I was finally in a place where I could belong—a family—where you snuggle up at night to keep warm in a Syrian refugee camp in Greece. We loved each other, and soon, from those experiences I began to grasp the truth that maybe God loves me too. The reality worked my brain to perceive truth, but today the opposite happened.
On my 18th mile my body doesn’t work anymore, and every movement is stiff and painful. There is only a half mile left, and as I’m trying to push through I remember the visualization technique that Jerome gave us to insight hope and remind us of what we stand for. Up my sleeve I have a memory of a place that encapsulates joy to me. A two year old memory finishing my first full length marathon: the sense of accomplishment, the 2 young men that I was mentoring cheering me on, my best friends all around me as I collapse in shear exhaustion, my parents there as well, and I remember thinking that this might be as close to heaven as we can get on earth.
Emotionally, I’m overwhelmed by the beauty of it all, and as I run on that glistening black street in Georgia, I am reminded that I’m not just fighting for myself. The experience brings me closer to a truth that is hard to explain: I feel a thing, but I’m not fighting for the feeling—I’m fighting for those people, for that place, for the people who don’t know that kind of love, and I realize I’m fighting for everything that the moment in time represents.—To borrow a line from the end of the Two Towers, as Sam motivates Frodo, “That there’s some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for”.
Instantly, my muscles loosen, my steps widen, and I begin to pick up the pace.
18 miles is done, but before I am able to adjust back to life I’m flooded with a sense of heaven. My mind picks up the descriptions I’ve read before, and I feel the people who have come before me, I feel a part of a giant family that revels in the reality of one another and Christ. From above, I feel as if all of heaven, including all of God cheer me on, and I’m brought to tears, collapsing in the drive-way as my light head flounders like a rag doll.
Perception is reality, but we need to align our perceptions with reality. It may be hard—like running 18 miles. You may even be dreading it, but perhaps the reality is far better than you could even imagine or express. — Sometimes we sell ourselves short, because we don’t have a good idea of ourselves or of God. Paul prays in Ephesians 3 that we would understand both who we are, who God is, and how much God truly loves us.
“And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”
That sounds incredibly beautiful, but it’s not a thing that comes naturally to anyone. It’s rare that people haven’t had some sort of experience that has put it in their minds that they don’t deserve that kind of love or that it’s not real.
The experience that I had today wasn’t mystical—it was hard won. Starting off this morning I began to think that God had something He wanted me to accomplish, and that I simply wasn’t measuring up to whatever that was. That was my starting point, tired, a little shamed, for nebulous reasons, and intimidated by what was ahead of me. However, the journey of a run forces thoughts to be wrestled with, and there the battle was won this time, enabling me to see truth. Still, I didn’t get there on my own, the prayer from Kyle helped change the mood before the run, and from there I listened to songs that praised God and revealed truth while I was running. Without these steps I don’t think I would have been able to comprehend—or think — or have hope—or have faith—that God was loving me.
Thank You,
