John Ortberg tells the story of Tattoo the basset hound…. Tattoo didn’t intend to go for an evening run, but when his owner shut his leash in the car door and took off with Tattoo still outside the vehicle, he had no choice. A motorcycle officer named Terry Filbert noticed a passing vehicle with something that appeared to be dragging behind it. As he passed the vehicle, he saw the object was a basset hound on a leash. “He was picking them up and putting them down as fast as he could,” said Filbert. He chased the car to a stop, and Tattoo was rescued, but not before the dog reached a speed of twenty to twenty-five miles per hour and rolled over several times. The dog was fine but asked not to go out for an evening walk for a long time. There are too many of us whose days are marked by “picking them up and putting them down as fast as we can.” Into such a world of busyness, Jesus comes to offer radical rest. This rest takes at least three different forms that we can see in our pass...
Eighty-six-year-old Joy Johnson, a veteran of 25 New York City marathons, died with her running shoes on. Johnson, who was the oldest runner in the 2013 marathon, fell at the 20-mile marker in the event. But she got up again, and she crossed the finish line in about eight hours. After the race she returned to her hotel room, lay down with her shoes on, and never woke up. Here’s the real kicker: Johnson didn’t run her first marathon until she was sixty-one years old. Ironically, Johnson was a career gym teacher, but a stranger to personal exercise until she took a three-mile walk in 1986. Then she started jogging and competing in 10-K races. By 1988 she had competed in her first New York City Marathon. Three years later she recorded her best time at age sixty-four: 3 hours and 55 minutes. After being a runner for a while, Johnson established a daily routine. She would wake up at 4 am, drink her coffee while reading her Bible, and then set out on an eight-mile pre-dawn run. “When you wak...