Skip to main content

My Battle Cry


In July 2017 I wrote my last post about running. I wrote of Goals and of Cost, of Declaration and Revolution. In the intervening months I carried a 40 lb jerrycan of water through the Global 6k for Water in Chicago. I trained for and ran my second Chicago Marathon, propelled onward by an overwhelming crowd of supporters. I welcomed my wife across her first marathon finish line, followed by my sister Tracy. But most importantly, with your help we raised over $10,000 for clean water - that's over 200 lives changed forever by a humble gift of $50, to bring them access to a clean, fresh well and end the cycle of hauling surface water carrying parasites and disease and risk of death. Those 200 lives were well worth every mile. But there's more to fight for.

Then came a season of recovery. Many of you haven't heard from me for over a year, because I didn't run a Marathon last year. But that doesn't mean I stopped moving. During the cool early months of 2018, I met weekly with a group of guys to share community on the trails in the frosty Saturday morning hours. Later my wife and I celebrated our anniversary running another Global 6k for Water together, and I trained for and ran the Chicago Half Marathon, for which some of you generously supported Team World Vision clean water projects. But of much greater significance, I got to support Tracy as she ran back-to-back marathons in Chicago and New York to challenge friends and family to sponsor children through World Vision. In both cases, I proudly joined the crowds of spectators and yelled myself hoarse to cheer her on, celebrated her victories, empathized with her exhaustion, and bought her ice cream. Tracy won't stop there. My story doesn't stop there. There's more to fight for.

I sometimes pause to wonder where this journey is taking me. How many more miles will I run? How much training? How many races? I honestly don't know what lies beyond the horizon for me, but I know there's more to fight for. So TODAY I RUN. I run for change. I run for life. I run for hope. I run for love. I run because there's more to fight for, and this is my Battle Cry: TODAY I RUN.

So it is with great honor and hope that this September I will run the 2019 Berlin Marathon.

What's your Battle Cry? Maybe you've never asked yourself that question with those words, but you've certainly considered your charge. Do you feel accountability for the change you want to see in this world? Maybe you know there's need, you know there's hurting, but you're frozen, hogtied by the immense scale of the problems of this world. But I say: you have the very real power to act and create change. Find your action and make it your Battle Cry. Maybe your role is not to run - that's my Battle Cry. But you can certainly act. There's more to fight for, so stand up and act, because life is too short and too precious for inaction. TODAY I RUN. What's your Battle Cry?

Today, this very moment, I can introduce you to a child who needs you. If you're looking for YOUR BATTLE CRY, maybe this is what you act on. Standing up for this one child is simple and probably easier than you'd like to admit, and yet... to this one child, it can quite literally mean the world. So if you feel an urge to move, follow it. Stand, act, CRY OUT!

CLICK HERE to start your charge. And thank you dearly for your support.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When We Struggle

I think probably one of the most consistent factors in the experience of any runner, in fact of any biker, swimmer, or athlete of any sort, is the struggle. It's inevitable, a rite of passage, a fact of life - and you could probably make the case that an athlete who never struggles probably isn't doing something right.

[Quick aside - it took me a long time to accept the moniker of "runner," but eventually it becomes a little absurd for someone who runs more days than they don't run to keep claiming they aren't a runner. But I still don't consider myself an athlete; I use the term here loosely.]

The past couple of weeks I have been struggling more than usual. I hit a perfect storm at the beginning of July: a family vacation (with all the overeating, overexerting, and under-sleeping that goes along with it), the first real heat of the Summer, and the steady strain of increased training miles. What's more, I have been plagued lately by blisters, nagging h…
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Child Sponsorship?

It's probably fairly safe to say that if you've gotten so far as to open my blog, you likely have an idea of why Child Sponsorship is important. You may know some of the facts, or you're just generally aware of the vast disparities in quality of life around the globe.  You may even have some internal gnawing that nudges you toward action. If that's the case, then I don't need to tell you the statistics and logistics of Child Sponsorship. I don't need to tell you why you should sponsor a child.
What I do feel an need to share is why my family has chosen to sponsor children. I make this distinction because Child Sponsorship is a commitment that people often enter into for very personal and important reasons. Though the what and the how are similar, the why is unique to you. And to us.
At the core, my wife and I sponsor two little boys, Victor and Omar, because we couldn't justify reserving the blessings in our lives for ourselves. 
When our first son was sti…
Post a Comment
Read more

It Starts with a Spark

How much power is in a spark?
There are many, many things that you can Google and get the answer you need within seconds, but I had to do a ridiculous amount of searching and math to get a halfway respectable answer to this question. But let's err on the high end and say that a particularly large and hot steel spark can represent up to 11 joules of energy. It just so happens that 11 joules could power an energy-efficient 10 watt LED light bulb (a typical lamp) for just over 1 second, if I did my math correctly.* There's nothing terribly powerful about turning on a lamp for 1 second. Not much can be done in the darkness with 1 second of lamp light.

But in 2018, a rancher in California hammering a metal stake struck a single blow that produced a single spark that ignited a patch of grass that spread to a tree that spread to a forest and became the largest wildfire in California history. By the end, this fire had burned for over 100 days and covered 640 square miles. And (here&#…
Post a Comment
Read more