WALK WITH ME

Here's something I wrote back in 2005, unedited:

It's amazing how five months of jogging for 20 minutes and lifting weights three to five times a week can increase your stamina and endurance! I was bored tonight, so I decided to go out and take a nice jog around the neighborhood.  When I last did this way back in September, I got winded after about the first four minutes, but tonight I felt like Forrest Gump...I seriously felt like I could run from here to L.A. with energy to spare.  I felt like a running machine! I passed by about four opportunities to take a shorter route home, but I didn't take any of them.  It was a glorious night.

Anyhow, I passed by two couples walking with each other on my run.  Seeing them was nice, and made me yearn for the day when I might walk side by side with my wife on a warm summer night when we are elderly.  As I was taking a shower, I realized the significance of walking with your lover.

When you see a couple jogging together, it's nice to see but nothing special.  But when you see a couple, young or old, walking side by side, it's somehow romantic and wonderful to behold, something that you envy.  There's just a lot more intimacy when you walk side by side with someone.  When you run side by side, you can't really talk with each other, you can't really hold hands, it's hard to keep the exact same pace as the other person, and there's always that subtle competitive tension...it's just impersonal.

But when you walk side by side with someone, you can talk as you please without being short of breath, you can hold hands, step in stride with the other person, and all fear of falling behind or going too fast disappears.  It's just so intimate.

I believe that it's the same in our walk with God.  I guess our tendency is to run (and in a sense, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 9 and Hebrews 12, we must) towards our goal, but because we are yet such foolish and awkward creatures, spiritual infants, when we run ahead of our Lord's will we lose our way and stumble.  We encounter many situations and times in our lives when it seems that things happen that cause us to slow down, when bumps rear their ugly forms above the plane...a career path suddenly seems hopeless, a loved one leaves us, friends desert us, financial troubles abound...and I think many times this is the doing of our Lord, who wants to slow us down, pull us back, grasp our hand, and walk side by side with us again.

When we begin to run ahead of our Lord (in a completely metaphorical sense, of course, for who could outrun One who fills the universe, who is always behind and ahead of us at all times to push us and to pull us?) His voice becomes muddled in the wind, we let go of the guiding hand that has been leading us, and our pride begins to whisper to us sweet lies of our self-reliance and we begin to believe that God was only a heavy burden that slowed us down.

What we fail to realize in our slow times is that God wants to walk with us, side by side.  He wants intimacy with us, and when we complain and become frustrated because He has slowed us down for no apparent reason, we are blind to the true nature of our situations.  Many of our prayers for quick deliverance from our hardships are, in essence, asking for less intimacy, less love, less of Him, not more.

We know this, don't we? When we look back at the hardest and most trying times in our lives, don't we always see times of great intimacy with our Father? It has never been otherwise, and there is no reason to think that will ever change.

So, Lord, I guess I'm not asking for a quick and easy reprieve...I only ask that You would hold my hand tighter and speak wonderful things to me during this time, that You would walk with me through this valley as long as You desire, and that you would draw me ever closer to You forever.

"Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him away." - Genesis 5:24

"Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God." - Genesis 6:9

"Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did." - 1 John 2:6

"And this is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands. As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love." - 2 John 1:6