Jim, my dear friend and everyone’s favorite Australian priest, visited this week. I never expected things to be different from when we last met, and thankfully it wasn’t. Yet his visit reminded me that much had changed since we first said goodbye from Folly Beach, SC two years ago. The time had changed me in many ways. Physically, I’d stopped running entirely for a six month period because of injury—sadly I’d stopped stretching too. So when Jim asked me to run a half marathon with him the morning of graduation last Sunday, my immediate reaction was “I’ll never walk again.” Apart from my complete lack of training, it was graduation morning—why punish oneself?!
Yet something told me I needed to do it. And so, it's Thursday evening as I stretch my still tight hamstrings on the floor of the airplane, somewhere over the Atlantic between Detroit and Amsterdam, and I'm contemplating the resiliency of the human body, and the spiritual benefit of that half-marathon Sunday morning. During that run I recognized that I’d finally been prioritizing my spiritual well-being ahead of my physical well-being and it has paid dividends in my overall health.
Our bodies and our spirits are so intrinsically connected. They both need stretching and care. Jesus seemed to demonstrate that in his own physical and spiritual journey into the wilderness—“tempted (both physically and spiritually) by the one opposed to God. He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterward he was famished… Then the one opposed to God left Jesus, and suddenly angels came and waited on him” (Matthew 3:1,11).
