We Can Be Heroes

One of the things I’ve always wanted to do is to run a marathon. Well, I think what might be more accurate to say is that I’ve always liked the idea of running a marathon. Friends of mine have run them, and I’ve gone to see folks finish them before. I don’t put a lot of stock in statistics, but a very quick Google search tells me that less than 1% of the U.S. population has run a marathon. So it might be the drive a society places on being in the 99th percentile, but it’s an idea I’ve always had.

This weekend, a friend ran the Honolulu Marathon. He ran it in a time that I don’t think I could reasonably achieve in my life (and still have a life). He placed in the top 6% for his category and it was his first marathon. My only experience of his running the race, though, was the statistical readout of his progress along the route. I got readouts every 10 kilometers or so about his pace, and at the end I saw how he compared to all of the other competitors like him. It was great information about the race.

Since then, I heard from him about the race. I heard what the last few miles felt like and the increasingly longer stays at the water stations. I heard his take on the people he ran with. I heard about what he would do differently next time and what he’d do the same. I even heard about what running like that can do to your body and its functions. I heard about…a lot. This elite runner—a top finisher in an event less than a percent of a population has ever finished—seemed pretty darn human all of a sudden.

That is the problem with so much of what we think about life. We have descriptions or even facts about the past or about something we believe, and that is our experience of it. The numbers I saw through his whole race were pretty stellar, and they still are, but hearing about how a body breaks down, how bodily functions become less than voluntary in some situations, and how through all of this, a person still finishes the race—this gives me real hope.

Documents, readouts, statistics, even texts—these are all helpful in their own ways, but when we put too much faith in any one of these things, we can never get the full picture. We might even romanticize something terribly difficult simply because some information we have makes it sound like a big achievement or accomplishment. When we learn from just one person what their experience was like of this event, it changes what we think about it forever. And so it is with so many ideas, isn’t it? Maybe it’s the difference between religion and faith. Maybe it’s the difference between a plan and its execution. Maybe it’s just a lesson in being careful what we wish for. But no matter what it is for you, I see the faith, the execution, and making a wish come true at last for what it is: the act of a hero, and nothing less.

And may we all be heroes in our own ways this week, my friends.

Rev. T. J.