Racing/Eating/Hoarding Free Stuff For the Cure... and Other Adventures

I used to HATE running. It was painful and tiring and required some degree of athletic prowess. While I still don't consider myself a "runner," I'm in adequate shape so when Starbucks asked local partners to consider joining their team for today's Race for the Cure, I thought I'd give it a whirl. After all, it's for a good cause.

Well, by this morning "Team Starbucks" had dwindled to Randy and me, so with a "who needs them" attitude, we took our marks behind about a 100 people and waited for the beginning of the race. The run itself went pretty smoothly. A local drumline set our pace in the mall parking lot and a chorus of cicadas kept us moving through the adjacent soybean fields that I'd somehow never noticed from my car.

At the finish line, Randy and I hit up the booths for free stuff. I love free stuff. Especially when that free stuff comes in the form of bagels from PANERA!!! I also got free deodorant and a heinously small t-shirt advertising Soft & Dri. Excellent.

However, it was what I was reading before the race that really got me moving in the furthest regions of my soul. I'd been reading Donald Miller's Searching for God Knows What off and on all summer. Well, more off than on, considering I'm not even half way through. Anyway, this morning while I awaited my teammate(s), I came across this picture of Adam and Eve that rocked my spirit:

... And then I began to wonder about Eve, what the scene might have looked like when she and Adam first met. Dante paints the meeting as being more realistic than I had imagined, writing that the slow-to-love Eve did not find Adam the least bit attractive, becoming enamored, instead, with her own reflection in some water. It's true women are terribly enamored with their own reflections. You can't blame them, though. If I were good-looking, I would certainly go around looking at myself all the time, too. And it is also true women are slow to love. I used to think this was because something was wrong with them, but, over time, I wondered whether they were more deliberate than men about important decisions. Romantic decisions. And in comparison I realized they were infinitely more intelligent about relational matters than men.

But when I was reading the text the way John Sailhamer [an OT scholar] said to read the text, I noticed Adam and Eve didn't meet right away. Moses said God knew Adam was lonely or incomplete or however you want to say it, but God did not create Eve directly after He stated Adam is lonely. This struck me as funny because a lot of times when I think about life before the Fall, I don't think of people going around lonely. But that thought also comforted me because I realized loneliness in my own life doesn't mean I am a complete screwup, rather that God made me this way. You always picture the perfect human being as somebody who doesn't need anybody, like a guy on a horse out in Colorado or whatever. But here is Adam, the only perfect guy in the world, and he is going around wanting to be with somebody else, needing another person to fulfill a certain emptiness in his life. And as I said, when God saw this, He did not create Eve right away. He did not give Adam what he needed immediately. He waited. He told Adam to name the animals...

There is a reason for every season in life, even this one. The other day I found myself singing along to a Blue October song on the radio, empathetically stating, "I'm cold as cold as cold can be." I'm numb, and more than a little secluded, not because I don't have friends or anything but because I'm struggling to open up even to my own self. I guess I should make a point to remember all that is happening right now, to record these confusing emotions upon my heart so that one day when God decides to supply the needs and desires I'm not sure I have, I will truly be thankful to him for delivering me from this present state of limbo.