Knowing Where to Stand

I am not a risk taker. I'm a big fan of seat belts, life jackets and bike helmets. I avoid airplanes. I stand back on train platforms, and walk well onto the shoulder of the road. The closest I ever get to reckless behavior is eating raw cookie dough. I like to organize my life so I have maximum control over safety factors.

I know I emit this need for minimizing chances of danger. My son, when deciding upon what high school sport he wanted to pursue as a freshman, asked “You wouldn't let me play football, would you?” He knew the answer before he asked the question, and went off to decide between the safer options of soccer and cross country, a sport he had already participated in in middle school.

It was his decision to run cross country that turned me into a spectator of distance races, a position that I took to almost professional lengths to perfect. Counting middle school, high school and college, I “trained” for twelve years as a skilled watcher of runners. I prided myself on knowing where to stand. I would print maps of race courses, studying them to figure out where was the best places to stand and watch for my runner, where to run to next and wait, and next, and finally where to get close enough to the finish line to see the last part of the race. The finish line is always the most crowded, and it's hard to get a good view, so I would usually opt to stand about a tenth of a mile from the finish.

Running is one of the safest of sports, barring undiagnosed heart conditions and aging joints, and race watching, one of the safest of spectator sports. (When was the last time you heard of a runner careening out of control and crashing into a crowd of spectators, or someone being hit in the head by a wildly thrown running shoe?) It is because I perceive running and race watching this way, that the explosions during the Boston Marathon hit me the hardest of any terrorist attacks in recent years. Why? Because I felt like I - me, my athletes and my spectator sport - had been personally targeted. Had I been watching that race, I would have been standing where the second bomb went off, my idea of the perfect distance from the finish line. I wondered how many of the victims of the bombing were like me, cautious people, non-risk-takers, confident that they were standing in a safe place, watching a safe sport. It was a good reminder to me that for all my careful choices and safe living, I have little control over my life. I think I know where to stand – in many different areas of my life - but the reality is that only God knows if the place I have chosen is safe. In the gospel of Luke I'm faced with the statement “And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?” So many of my choices, consciously and subconsciously, try to do just that – increase my span of life. I would do better to plant my feet before the One who actually knows about such things, the One who holds that book where all the days ordained for me were written before one of them came to be. It's only by God's grace and in His grace that I can truly stand secure. And if I'm standing in that place, then it doesn't really matter where else my feet may chose to stand...

In the long run, we are all dead. - John Maynard Keyes