Devotion: Consistency in Your Running and Prayer Life
Pilgrim Endurance envisions gathering an honest community of men, no longer isolated in their running and spiritual lives, who embody simplicity, devotion, and public virtue.
Consistency in running and prayer are the same kind of devotion. Let’s think about this connection within the metaphor of romantic relationship, which many Christian mystics found indispensable in describing their relationship with God. Nevermind that many a spouse has named running as another relationship in your life. First, consider a description of a relationship. Then apply that pattern to prayer and finally to running.
RELATIONSHIP
As you read through this, keep in mind how it parallels with your running or spiritual life. This may be a bit idealized, but don’t take it as a way to judge yourself or others. It’s an exploration. First, a relationship doesn’t begin without desire inside each person to connect with another. I suppose a big part of that comes with puberty, and at the same time, I know several people who have never dated because they were focused on other parts of their life, and the desire for a romantic relationship didn’t rise up their priority list. Once that desire arises, they begin searching. That path is often long and winding with various stops and starts, encounters and disappointments, but it can also be filled with hilarious attempts to impress and much space for learning about yourself. It begins with desire and continues with searching.
Then, one day it happens. (Of course it’s more complicated than this, but I know it would bore you to death!) You encounter the one you’ll commit to and you invest regularly. Your relationship builds up as you have various experiences together. More than agreeing on ideas and positions you hold, you build a friendship. Friendship, as John Gottman has found in his decades of marriage research, is the basis for a strong marriage. Your friendship builds to the point where you love one another enough to commit for the rest of your lives, and you set off on a daily journey of learning to love one another better.
Relationships develop with encounter, investment, and commitment.
Eventually, your relationship bears fruit, and it does so because of the overflowing fountain of God’s grace within it. You may start a ministry or a business. You may make a significant contribution to your city or country. You may raise children, whether or not they’re yours. You find you can walk that road because you’re doing it together, and when it comes to the end for one, you both do what it takes so they can die well. The one left behind with this deep loss grieves it and is prompted to find a new purpose in life, if their heartbreak doesn’t take them too. So finally, relationships blossom with fruit, are maintained in consistency, and inevitably experience loss and grief. It begins in desire and searching, continues in encounter, investment, and comment, and finds fruit, consistency, and loss. Now, let’s take this pattern into prayer.
“It begins in desire and searching, continues in encounter, investment, and comment, and finds fruit, consistency, and loss.”
PRAYER
In prayer, it sure is hard to pray without any desire to pray or with other higher priorities. For many, prayer begins as a response to difficult moments in their lives, to a search for meaning, and that’s normal. God germinates that desire in them. They don’t think to pray other than when they need help. This often happens before an encounter with God or when a sense of obligation arises. I imagine many people find themselves here. At this stage of the prayer journey, God can seem distant and powerful and hard to relate to. If they get attached to this image of God, it will likely take great love or great suffering to break into another way of relating with God. This is the “long and winding path” I mentioned above. When you persist, God responds, and you find a reason for consistent intentional contact with God.
“When you persist, God responds, and you find a reason for consistent intentional contact with God. “
You encounter God, and it changes everything. Now your desire to grow relationship with God transitions from what you get out of it to what you can invest: your commitment. You give time and heart more and more regularly. You progress in integrating your life with your growing relationship with God. At some point, that transition deepens, and you have a regular daily connection with God. It bears fruit in your life in how you love others and yourself. You journey with God and your community, consistently responding to the real circumstances of life in light of your growing relationship with God.
Many of the mystics describe a stage in relationship with God where it seems that there is a death: a loss of the feelings you get when you do the right thing or pray. This is an invitation deeper into relationship with God, where God purifies our motivations for relationship. We would likely not choose this on our own, but it is God’s choice and desire to draw us deeper. There is much more to say, but most people know only the experience up to this point. And like the death of your spouse after decades of fruitful marriage, it can be hard to imagine what comes next. There is more. Stay tuned.
“Many of the mystics describe a stage in relationship with God where it seems that there is a death: a loss of the feelings you get when you do the right thing or pray. This is an invitation deeper into relationship with God, where God purifies our motivations for relationship. We would likely not choose this on our own, but it is God’s choice and desire to draw us deeper.”
RUNNING
Desire. Search. Encounter. Invest. Commit. Fruit. Consistent. Loss.
This isn’t the last time I’ll write on this topic, so I want to offer an overview here. Imagine your running story: how it began, how it persisted, and how it is now. As I think of mine and yours (all of yours), it seems that our running stories may be more diverse than our relationship stories, and maybe just as diverse as our journeys with prayer. Here’s mine for a quick example.
To begin with, my desire came for fast-twitch sports like volleyball, rather than slow-twitch sports, but the search continued until I found that I could encounter God in endurance sports. I found nordic skiing in remote western Alaska, which led to trail running during divinity school in Minnesota. I led a study abroad pilgrimage along the 500-mile Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Spain. I returned to Colorado and began running most days of the week for the first time. I invested and found fruit in my love for the trails in the foothills along the front range.
But then something unexpected happened, I lost running and the joy of it. I developed an overuse injury in my ankles that lasted for 18 months, when it should have lasted far less, because I didn’t have any kind of guide to show me the way. I worked with several physical therapists and dove into books and podcasts and videos. I had lost the innocent joy of running in nature, but I never forgot the way running allowed me to encounter God.
As I healed, it was consistency that brought me back to a fruitful relationship with running. It was a consistent, gradual increase in distance, time, and elevation. It was consistent core and leg strength work. It was making sure I got out there six days a week and that I rested really well. Loss, grieved well, opens space for new life eventually. I know that running may eventually be taken away from me without any way to get it back, so I’ll savor it now while still planning for this to be a long road. May this devotion be fruitful to my and your spiritual journeys, and may we find companions along the way for support.
