I’ve been thinking about marathons. I watched my friend Jonny Taylor run the London Marathon some years ago and yelled encouragement on the approach to Tower Bridge before bursting through the crowd to run with him for a moment. I must have been so annoying.
Now I’ve run half a marathon but at the end of that, if you’d asked me to run the same distance again I’d have laughed in your face if I hadn’t been having a catastrophic, near-death experience. So, to you Chris, and you Vassos, and all of you who went the distance in London on Sunday, or have done elsewhere: I am lost in admiration.
There are other marathons though. When you’re thirteen, the school day is a marathon. The American presidential election is a marathon. A working life is a marathon. When I was six, I ran down a slide in our house and put my hands through the glass front door. For my Mum, the next few minutes were a very bloody marathon.
I remember my eldest, Miriam, being born. Rachel, her Mum, laboured for three days. I remember trying to teach Miriam to ride a bike (badly and impatiently). I remember the bus ride when she and I and her brother and sister debated whether to call the cat ‘Auction’. I remember worrying when she went traveling, and for the first time not really knowing where she was in the world. It was all a marathon.
Then this weekend I went to stay with her in her home and for a moment it felt as if the marathon had ended. Until I walked out of the door and realised that I was already worrying again.
Loving someone is a marathon, whether they’re your parent, your friend, your child or your partner. Sometimes we don’t make it through a whole marathon. We don’t always succeed. I haven’t, and there’s no shame in that, though there’s pity.
The very last thing that Jesus said to his friends was this: ‘I am with you always, to the very end of the age’. What Jesus knew was that we need someone to run the marathon with us, because when we’re in relationship with other people we are never free from concern for them and this is a hard thing. It’s hard to run with someone to the end of the age.
But it’s also a good thing. A very good thing. In fact, I reckon that caring consistently, long-term, about other people is what proves we’re human. We run that marathon together. And we run better.
I’m still scarred from running through the front door when I was 6. It took 48 stitches to patch my arms back together. My poor mother.
The picture is the sign from the front door of Miriam’s flat in Glasgow.