"Double Booked" OR "The Plate-Spinner"

I used to hate winter. I self-diagnosed myself with Seasonal Affective Disorder a long time ago. And yes, it's occurred to me that the winter depresses me simply because I believe winter should depress me. But I think it's simply the cold, the dark mornings, the dark evenings, and the gray sky that doesn't budge for three months.

But, as I've gotten older (and gotten in better shape), I find myself liking winter more and more. Winter, I've found, has some of the best running weather of the year.  

Yes, running in the morning is out because of the extreme cold (or at least the perceived extreme cold), but I can run pretty much any other time of the day. I'm never forced to stay inside because of rain. In fact, when it starts snowing, that's when I want to lace up my shoes and get out the door.

But, although I've grown to somewhat like winter in the last few years, I'm never sad to see it go.

The weather for the last week has been downright phenomenal. Sunny. Mild. The sound of birdsongs in the air again. It feels like spring is right around the corner. And that means, for me...

RACE SEASON.

This spring's race season looked to be the same as almost every year past. The Shamrock Shuffle 3K in downtown Lexington. Run The Bluegrass Half Marathon at Keeneland. Derby Festival Mini-Marathon in Louisville. And, of course, The Flying Pig Marathon in Cincinnati, Ohio. My standard spring races, and all my favorites.

It's also Lent, which is one of my favorite times of the year.

For those of you who don't know, Lent is the forty days (not including Sundays) leading up to Easter. It begins on Ash Wednesday and, of course, ends on Easter. It's celebrated in remembrance of the forty days before Jesus' crucifixion, when he returned to Jerusalem one last time to preach and teach, even though he knew it would lead to his death.

Growing up, I was never a big observer of Lent (actually, I was never a big observer of anything in church). Even when I got older and started growing in my relationship with Christ, Lent still seemed like something only for Catholics. But a few years ago I went to my first Ash Wednesday service, and it really struck me just how significant Lent should be to a Christian's life.

It's tradition to give up something during Lent. Not necessarily something bad, but something you could do without for forty days (not counting Sundays) in order to grow closer to God.

Hillary and I decided to give up social media during Lent. In addition, we also decided to take on a book study. We began reading Breathe, by Priscilla Shrirer. The book is about what it means to live a life with God's Sabbath in mind. Not necessarily living for Sundays; simply living life with a margin of rest around it. It's about knowing what things steal our contentment, our peace,  and our rest and keep us from living life.

Ironically, we've had a hard time keeping up with it.

It seems like the more we try to eliminate things from our lives to make room for time with God, the more we encounter things that simply have to be done. And yes, it feels like a trick of the Devil, trying to suck away our time with our Creator, but I'll be darned if it's not effective. It's not like I can just decide not to grade tests, or create lesson plans, or do all the other little non-classroom things I have to do for my teaching job. And Hillary can't simply stop seeing patients, or stop completing long, irksome charts for those patients. Couple that with time with the kids, time to maintain our own relationship, cooking dinner every night, and various other commitments, it feels like every minute of our days are spent simply preparing for the next day. Just so we can wake up the next morning and do the whole cycle over again.

I want to let some things go. But how?

Yesterday, I was writing all my spring races on a Runner's World calendar my brother, Aaron, and his wife got me for Christmas. I was thrilled to find that two of the races I had signed up for were actually pre-written on the calendar!

But I was less thrilled to see them on the same weekend.

The Flying Pig Marathon in Cincinnati and the Derby Festival Half in Louisville. It didn't even occur to me to check, because the two have NEVER been on the same weekend in the past. The Derby Fest is always the weekend before the Kentucky Derby (thus, the last weekend in April). And the Flying Pig is always the first weekend in May. Consecutive weeks.

Not this year. This year, May 1st is on a Sunday. The stars have aligned in such a way that must choose between two of my favorite races. I'm double-booked.

Neither of these races are bad. In fact, they're both great races, and the proceeds for each go to great causes. But I simply can't do them both. I'm going to have to make a choice.

It seems that God's trying to teach me a lesson. It's no coincidence that this perfectly mirrors my current dilemma about making quiet time for Him.

Like one of the races, something is going to have to go. Maybe I have to change the way I'm thinking about my lesson planning. Maybe I have to look for other ways I waste time (although, objectively, I can't see what else I could cut and still maintain sanity). Maybe He'll simply give me some grand revelation about the whole thing, I'll find the answer I'm looking for, and it'll be so simple that I won't believe I didn't realize it in the first place.

I personally hope He goes for the grand revelation. When it comes to discernment, I'm pretty dense.

Until that happens, I'll keep spinning the plates.

"The Old and the Young" OR "The Size of Our Footprints"

Sometimes I feel like all my posts on this blog revolve around getting older. I'm 33, so I'm not what I'd call "old", but it's fair to say that I'm not what many would call a 'young man' anymore. Then again, it's probably also fair to say that almost no one really "feels" old. Old is a word reserved for people older than YOU. It's for those people who were older than you back when you were really young. Old is a word we use for our parents and grandparents.

But it's not a world I'm able to use for one of my grandparents anymore.

Around a week ago, as I was celebrating my favorite team winning the Super Bowl, I got a call from my dad, stating that his father, my paternal grandfather, had passed away from complications of Alzheimer's disease. It wasn't a surprise; Elmer Smith had been in the care of a nursing home for almost a decade, and his cognition and lucid moments had been ebbing the whole time.

Two weeks ago, it looked like he was in his final days. So Hillary and I drove to Pikeville, KY to be with my family.

Elmer, my grandfather, my Pappaw, had been transferred to Pikeville Medical Center because he was no longer able to take food and water. There was no feeding tube.

By the end of the week, when Hillary and I arrived, he had been transferred back to the nursing home. Because he'd taken a slightly turn for the better, partly, but mostly because his Medicaid would no longer pay for him to remain in the hospital.

Though she'd never met him, Hillary had heard great things about my Pappaw from her own grandparents, who had been very close friends with him earlier in their lives. In fact, when I had told her grandfather, Ronnie Hensley, that Elmer Smith was my grandfather, he'd been astonished at the coincidence. But upon reflection, all of us acknowledge that such events are rarely coincidence at all, but the hand of God pushing things into place.

When we arrived at the nursing home, Pappaw wasn't awake. Apparently he hadn't actually been awake for a long time; my own parents had said they hadn't seen him open his eyes in over a year. Still, I spoke to him. I held his hand. I introduced Hillary, and told him about the two beautiful great-granddaughters he now had. Hillary spoke to him, and touched his face.

And he opened his eyes.

I'm not sure if there was anything behind those blue eyes, but they were open. He mumbled a few words. He even laughed, although I can't be sure if it was because of something one of us said or simply something in his mind. But it doesn't really matter, because I got to interact with him one last time.

When he passed last Sunday, Hillary and I took off from work to drive in for the funeral. But, after dropping off the girls at school and daycare, a band of snow slammed the area, and we were forced to stay in town. I had no peace about it for the whole day. How could I? Where can someone find peace in knowing they've missed the celebration of a life of someone so prolific?

Over a belated brunch, when we realized we couldn't brave the interstate in the weather, Hillary reminded me that Elmer Smith was not being laid to rest. In fact, he wasn't there at all. Elmer Smith knew Christ on a deep level, and had spent a large portion of his life preaching the Gospel to others in  a little Primitive Baptist Church in their hollow of Blackberry, Kentucky.

Alzheimers had taken Elmer Smith's memories, withered his body, and dulled his mind. But his soul belonged to God, and everything else that had been taken from him had been completely restored. He was not only more whole than he had been in a decade; he was more whole than he had ever been on earth, even at the height of his youth.

It's comforting to know that I will see him again one day, in a way I never got to see him on earth. 'Old' was a word I'd reserved for my grandfather when I was a little boy. The next time I see him, 'old' will not even be in my vocabulary. But it's still not much consolation to those of us left here on earth, staring at footprints that seem so large, far too large for us 'young' people to fill.

I am thirty-three years old. I have two stepdaughters, six and five years old. I am a little younger than my dad was when my brother and I were the age of Faith, my oldest child. When I look at my father, he still seems the same to me that he was then, and sometimes I still feel like the same child who ran around in the hills of Turkey Creek. I don't feel as old as my dad seemed when I was Faith's age. He seemed almost like one of the Greek heroes of legend, able to do absolutely anything.

I certainly don't feel like a Greek hero, although I may be in the eyes of my kids. I can't ask them; it's not really a fair question, not to mention that they might not have any idea how to answer it. And it might simply take the context of years to really put something like that into perspective. No doubt, she at least sees me as old, even though I don't feel it.

When I was kid, growing up, and I didn't understand my parent's seemingly pointless motivations for making me go to bed or eat my greens or whatever, I'd roll my eyes when they'd say, "You'll understand when you have kids."

As the 'young' are apt to do, I thought they were too old to understand.

But they were right. With kids of my own, it all suddenly makes sense.

Maybe my own footprints are getting bigger all the time. Right now, when I compare them to the people who came before me, the old people, my footprints seem so small. But, to those younger than me, how do my footprints appear? When my time comes, will my footprints still seem small to me?

Elmer Smith was a humble man, but I think he had an idea just how large his footprints seemed to us young people.

I recall one summer, when I was a teenager, a family gathering at my parents' old house. Pappaw was there, in full health. There were maybe thirty people there, once all the sons and daughters and cousins and grandkids were counted. I remember, standing next to Pappaw, and saying, as I gestured to the clamor and excitement of all the extended family, "You know, Pappaw, all of this is your fault."

He laughed, and said something to the extent of, "I know. And I'm darn proud of it."

You're missed, Elmer Smith. We'll see you soon.

Elmer Smith in the US Navy, circa 1950, Korean War