Young Life Triathlon Recap

Alright, this is the post I finally got around to writing about my first Olympic Triathlon. The week before I had just completed a fun, pretty darn successful race in Nevis called the Northwoods Triathlon (you can read the recap here).

That race had a lot of things going for it. It was a sprint distance, the temperature was perfect, there wasn't too much wind, I hadn't had vacation for a week in front of it. All those are good things. Now, take every one of those things and cross it out and you had this race.

In-between the sprint tri and this tri Kate, Natalie and I headed to vacation with my parents at a lake near Grand Rapids. This was great for relaxation purposes but maybe not ideal for training purposes. I got in two workouts during the week. I swam out to a sunken island for a 1/2 mile or so workout in some pretty rough winds, and I ran 3 miles on a stinking hot day. Both of those were good training for what was coming, though I'd be lying to you if I said that felt like enough.

Olympic triathlons have a standard 1.5k/40k/10k distance, or about 0.93 miles of swimming, 24.8 miles biking, and 6.2 miles running. I'm at a point now where all of that sounds pretty manageable, but what sounded less manageable was 90 degree heat and winds for open water swimming and running in the sun. That sounded just terrible.

The strange (backwards) blessing of faith

Psalm 128

I want to talk with you today for, oh, about fifteen minutes, on what it means to be blessed, because, well, that’s what Psalm 128 is about.

“Happy is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways// You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands; you shall be happy, and it shall go well with you” (Ps 128:1-2). OK, good start. Fear the Lord and we will be happy.

“Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be like olive shoots around your table.” Even better, follow the laws and you’ll have a fruitful wife and children six feet tall at the least. And so it continues with the blessing of children and, in turn, security, because that’s what children were for life in that ancient world (and perhaps it isn’t so different today). Walk in the way of the Lord and you will have these things.

OK, that’s a good starting point. But scripture doesn’t end with the Psalms. In fact, the Bible actually offers us two competing visions of blessedness. One is this idea found throughout the Old Testament that good things come to those who are faithful—children, long life, a beautiful spouse, the star on the basketball team; those kinds of things. Bad things, therefore, come to those who are unfaithful—defeat, death, eternal damnation. Even the counterpoint to this in the Old Testament—the book of Job—which goes out of its way to show how ridiculous it is to blame sin for bad things happening, ends the story by restoring to Job all the things he lost, as if a new and better wife and kids makes up for the loss of his first. This is how the Old Testament deals with blessing and it is limited.

Stop. Listen for God.

           Earlier this month we took our Junior High Confirmation students to the Minnesota Institute of Contemplatiion and Healing (MICAH) retreat center near Crookston for an overnight to center ourselves for a year of faith development, learning, and service. One of the primary foci of contemplative prayer, as described by MICAH’s director, Trey Everett, is to move us out of our heads and into our hearts. That sounds kind of vague and new-age-y so allow me to explain. In our heads we are concerned with products and efficiency, with “doing it right”, and with doing “enough” versus doing “not enough.” Our hearts, on the other hand, focus us not on the product but the process, not on efficiency but love, not on doing it the “right way” but exploring how we might do something differently, and, lastly, our hearts allow us freedom from the anxiety of worrying about doing enough and, most importantly, about being enough.

            God tends to speak to us on the heart-level, because it is there that we free ourselves from all the things that cause us anxiety and fear; it is there that we are free to be led beyond our expectations and imaginations.

            We live in an anxious world. In fact, the more efficient we get the more anxious we become. There’s this worry in the back of our minds that we can always be working more efficiently; that we can always be doing more; and the frightening reality is that it’s true. We can always be doing more. The New York Times just published an eye-opening exposé of the working environment at Amazon where workers are encouraged to spy on one another, report one another’s inefficiencies, and managers are expected to cull their workers ranks on a regular basis in the name of being as efficient and productive as possible. This might be an exceptional example, but it’s also kind of the norm for how the marketplace works in the year 2015. Farmers feel it. So do business owners and restauranteurs and teachers (maybe especially teachers). Even pastors feel it. How often are our churches judged by money in the bank and people in the seats on Sunday morning?

Northwoods Triathlon Recap

What's this? A race recap?! I haven't done one of these in a while, and now I'm going to be doing two in a week. That's because I had the awesomely amazing, maybe not quite so sane, idea of doing two triathlons as the bread around the meat of a week-long vacation to the lake.

We'll start in Nevis.

The Northwoods Triathlon isn't particularly big (some 200-some people), but it is popular, which sounds kind of confusing, but trust me, I'll explain. Registration opens each year for the race in the first week of January at 8 a.m. on some random morning. Race registration fills up by 9 a.m. of said morning every year. So, I had to actually put registering for a race on my calendar. It's a minor miracle I remembered.

Challenge #1:

I may have registered for the race months and months ahead of time, but that didn't stop me from completely forgetting about such unimportant things as, you know, lodging. So, a week before we were heading out Kate had the bright idea to check on hotel rooms. Nothing. Not expensive, not inexpensive. Nothing. The idea of tent camping before a race sounded less than ideal (especially with a toddler), but we didn't know what else to do. Then I had the brilliant idea to check with Steve Peterson, now Executive Director at Pathways to see if we could stay at Camp Emmaus, 25 miles from Nevis. We could. Thank God. Steve saved the day.

Repentant songs, sinful kings, and why good people aren't just rare but impossible

Psalm 51

David was in trouble. He’d done something terrible. It was bad enough having an affair with Bathsheba; worse still was sending Uriah off to die in the war. He’s broken no less than seven of the Ten Commandments in a single go, which is a pretty starling accomplishment if you stop and think about it. David, the king of Israel, is chief among sinners.

            If one of us did what David did we would find it difficult to ever be accepted in town again. We know how people would react; the kind of gossip spoken behind our backs. We wouldn’t feel welcome anywhere anymore—not in the church; let alone at the school or anywhere else in public.

            David is creepier, sleazier, and more of an abuser of power and people than we would tolerate in anybody in our neighborhood, let alone our public officials. And that could be the end of the story, except for this:

God chose David. This is critical. It means that David was more than an adulterer and murderer. We like to define people by their worst actions; they become: rapist, thief, adulterer, bad guy. God calls them something different; God calls them “sons” and “daughters.” We give scarlet letters; God gives names. God gives humanity. David is not excused; it’s not that there aren’t consequences; it’s just that there is nothing so terrible that it can separate us from the love of God. God uses us in our brokenness and what comes from this God-given humanity that we discover when we understand how broken we are is often something unexpectedly beautiful. Today it is this song: Psalm 51.