Way of the Runner (Part 3)

The Rain Delay
(Part three … Way of The Runner … )

At the next practice for the team the following week, all my team-mates gave me their sympathies. News of how Runo had beat me had traveled around the team and the school. I felt some consolation. Coach was pissed that I had let that common ploy by Runo cost his team my very low finishing points for the team’s total. We would have finished second in the team competitions had I not allowed Runo to shove me like that.

While I regretted letting the team down that way, I was yet more personally involved in the fiasco. I wanted a piece of Mr. Runo just one more time, and I quickly asked Coach that day if he would feel okay with me working out with the team again next year, my senior year, so I could have a chance at reclaiming what I felt was rightfully mine. He smiled and assured me that I could work-out with his team. I felt resolved to do just that.

My friend spoke with me after school that day, in the gym’s shower rooms. He confessed that he knew I could outrun him, and that I could probably, in his opinion, outrun Runo if I ever got into another race with him. I assured him that barring polio and the proverbial creek’s rising I would face that runner again next Thanksgiving. “I’ve got a whole year to get ready for that guy!” I said. But as things would go, that turned out not to be true.

We had three week-end meets left on the team’s schedule, after which would be held the city-wide Championship race. Of course, all four of these races were scheduled for Saturdays. I still worked out with the team that week, and the next weeks as well. Coach enjoyed seeing me push the runners in our afternoon work-outs. He still held resentments about my not competing for my school on Saturdays, but he kept that away from me. I’ve no idea how much he may have talked about it to faculty or to other students, but he spared me the grief.

During those weeks I continued my friendship with Lynn, but I spent less time on the phone with her after school. I did sit with her in church meetings, and she seemed naturally to understand how to give me some space. I was not as aware of my brooding as was she.

Finally, the season was over except for the coming week-end’s City Championship race. Reluctantly, and sadly, I turned in my running uniforms and sweats and my shoes. Coach, seeing me standing before his desk that Friday afternoon after our last team practice, gave a little twinkle in his eye which I’d never seen there before, and asked me if I’d like to just hang on to those shoes and the competition jersey and shorts. I was thrilled. I had not minded turning in the jersey and shorts and other items, but I already knew that I would miss the red leather running shoes. I beamed my thanks at him, and promised to take good care of them.

“Just get to know them perfectly, my boy, so they can help you beat Runo’s ass next year at the Turkey Day Run!”

I promised I would do just that, then turned and walked home. As I walked home, a distance of about four miles through neighborhoods to the edge of Memphis’ eastern city limits, which at that time was at the beginnings of the Wolf River bottom-lands, I noticed that the grey in the sky was getting darker. Quickly, it came up a rain, and this rain was heavy and steady. I was soaked through and through in a minute. I continued on my way, never dreaming that this rain was perhaps a huge favor in my young life.

I began my Sabbath observance at what the paper had said would be the minute of “sundown”, though there was no sun to be seen as the rain front grew worse and worse that evening. I put aside all my concerns about running, school-work, and friends. I meditated on Nature and my God and His Son Jesus. I tried to purify my thoughts, to look closely within myself to judge my motives and my state of spiritual love for my God. I slept peacefully that night. All through the night, the heavy rains continued. It was still raining strongly when I awakened the next morning.

That morning, I attended Sabbath-school before church, as I always did, and sat calmly and quietly through the morning’s sermon by the pastor. I looked often out the window, marveling that such rain could be sustained for so long.
Not once did the thought of the City Championship race enter my thoughts, until we were driving home from church. My middle brother said something about it being too bad I couldn’t be running against that mean old guy who had shoved me previously.

As my mother started to suggest to him that such thoughts were not acceptable for Seventh-day Adventists who were observing their holy Sabbath day, I relaxed my defenses against myself and did actually let the thought into my head that, yes, I agreed, it was too bad I was not getting to the starting line along about now for one last chance to justify myself as a cross-country runner. But then it hit me. It hit my dad at just the same time. He turned in his seat to my mother and said sort of as an aside, “Well, hon, I’m not sure I’d want to be running in all the water that’s bound to be standing over that course after all this rain. I mean, it’s still raining hard as all get-out!”

My mother turned and asked me if cross-country events were held regardless of weather conditions. I told her I did not know, but it was dawning on me that perhaps, maybe, hopefully, the race would be postponed. But I did not want to spoil my Sabbath with such thoughts, so I put it out of my mind and with all the detachment which any teenager can display, I sat quietly through the remainder of the ride home and went to my room for further meditating. I kept the running of races out of my mind.

After family lunch, I took a nap and upon awakening that evening I found that it was almost the end of the Sabbath.
Waiting until a proper lapse of time after the moment of sundown, (again, I used the time of sundown as given by the newspaper, since it was still raining cats and dogs outside under heavy sunless skies), I mustered all the non-chalance I could and turned on the television in hopes of finding a newscast with sports results. Presently, the news came that the City Championship Cross Country meet had been postponed due to rain.

My heart jumped, but my mother cautioned me that they might have rescheduled it for the following Saturday. “Let’s wait and see what happens.” she said. But just then the announcer told the tv audience that the race would be held on Sunday afternoon.

“Hot dog!” I yelled, jumping up and beaming. I can run in it!”

However, that was not to be the case either. It also rained all Saturday night, and all Sunday morning, continuing to rain throughout the afternoon, and the officials canceled it again. They declared that the new date of the race would be announced after the infernal rain ceased.

Now I was beginning to learn how people can get depressed! Darn, this was too much! Now it looked like the race would be pushed back all the way to the coming Saturday after all. Again I was intensely disappointed.

I went to school Monday morning, having been taken by my father in the family car, as it was still raining. But by second period, the clouds lifted and the sun was again visible. The whole world seemed to be soaked by the incessant rains. Still, just seeing the sunshine seemed to help me lift my spirits, which had been at a low since Saturday evening’s newscast.

I focused on my classes, and began to recall my customary happy energies. I had, after all, actually got to run in a real competition, a real race, and that was more than most Seventh-day Adventists could say. It had not seemed so close to sinning, from my view of it. I still understood that there is a basic temptation by distraction involved with competitive sports, so I managed to keep myself detached from much of what was going on inside me. So I thought.

Third period went by, and I was sitting in fourth period, about ten minutes into the class, when a knock came at Ms. Musick’s classroom door. It was Coach Blevins, and he whispered something hastily in her ear at the door. She turned and looked straight at me, and then smiled. Even she had known about the foul I’d been dealt at the hand of Runo.

Smiling at me, she asked if I would just as soon leave class early today, since she was not going to be covering anything she couldn’t catch me up on later anyway. I looked back at her with puzzlement all over my face. Then she told me to hurry up and go with Coach, that they had suddenly decided to hold the City Championship race this very afternoon. I needed no further explanation. I was out of there like light in a broken bulb, half-running half-skipping to keep up with Coach, who was asking me where were my running shoes?

It hit me! Oh no! I’d left them at home, knowing that I’d not be using them to work out this afternoon, and certainly not dreaming that the biggest race of the season would be run this afternoon. “Coach! I’ve got to get home to get the shoes!” I exclaimed.

“We’ve not got time for that. The race starts in forty-five minutes. It’s at Southwestern’s course, so you’ll know the course this time. Let’s haul-ass over to the locker-rooms and look for a pair of shoes for you. Also, I’ve got messengers getting the rest of the team out of classes right now. We’ll go in some faculty cars. Got no time to do anything! We’re likely to miss the starter’s gun if we don’t hurry!”

I was beside myself. The excitement of this surprise was too great for me. In the locker-room I picked up some running clothes and a heavy sweat-suit. But alas, there was not a pair of running shoes my size to be found! Soon my team-mates were showing up at the locker-rooms, and one of them offered to let me borrow his shoes. I declined.

Coach then hollered at me. “Boy, you get some damned shoes and get ’em quick. The rest of you get your butts out of here and check in at the parking lot for Doc McCall at his white van. There will be two other teachers’ cars next to his, and he’ll be standing there. Hurry up now!”

To satisfy Coach, I grabbed the pair of shoes closest to my size, knowing that I’d not wear them. Still, I dutifully clutched them and followed him and the other boys out to the parking lot for the urgent ride through several neighborhoods to the college campus where I had run in the Turkey Day Run. I was glad this race would be on a course I was familiar with.

When we arrived we noticed that all the other schools were apparently as disorganized as were we, and officials were walking swiftly among the clusters of hurried harriers making sure that coaches knew the procedures which would be followed in running the race that afternoon. Before I could figure out what to do about the shoes, and while Coach was nowhere to be seen, I slipped out the gym door to the starting area where several other runners were already stretching and doing jumping exercises. I was barefoot. The starting area was a field of cold, wet, mud. It was on higher ground, and proved to be the “driest” part of the course, but was still muddy.

The reason Coach had disappeared was he had decided to call my mother to see if she could possibly get over there with my running shoes. She agreed to do just that, but unfortunately, she lived too far away to make it before the starter’s gun sent the race into the mud and standing water which submerged nearly a third of the course. He never mentioned to me as we had lined up at the starting line that he had tried to get my shoes there. He sensed that they would not get there on time anyway, and he had a reservation about me pausing after the first lap long enough to get the shoes onto my feet and then continuing the race.

But things developed differently. As the sun had come out that morning, it had brought with it a quickly dropping cold-spell which happens often in Memphis, and even now the air was really too cold for most of the runners. Many of them had brought their sweat-shirts from the gym and now wore them over their running jerseys. Two boys had even opted to wear their sweat-pants. I wanted no part of heavy clothing, no matter if it was uncomfortably cold and getting colder by the minute. I shivered, but knew that after a lap I’d not feel cold.

Standing in the mud at the starting line, my feet went numb! I got frightened by that and explained it to my friend, who was in his running gear complete with his running shoes. How I envied him the luxury of having spiked running shoes that moment! Of all days, this sloppy wet excuse of a day was exactly when spiked running shoes would be most valuable.

He and two other team-mates got each side of me and let me lift my feet off the cold mud by bracing my arms over their shoulders. As my feet dangled cold and numb, Coach stood nearby and just shook his head. I could only wonder how it had seemed to always be that I found myself in strange predicaments, while my feet continued to spread their numbness up to my ankles and threatened to creep even higher up my legs.

I didn’t know if I should get back down and exercise, or keep my feet out of the cold mud every second I could before the race started. I didn’t have long to worry about what to do.

“Runners to your marks!” came the alert. Then, before my team-mates had time to let me down and get into their starting “leans”, quickly came a loud, “Get set!”, and even more quickly than possible the starter’s gun bellowed forth it’s freezing cough of insanity and the whole body of miserable runners took off on the most unpleasant running they would have encountered all year. Runo was among them.

My team-mates dropped me to the mud and took off. I stood there wondering if I could really expect to run this race with no shoes and numb feet. The fields of the course were visibly standing in water which was in places more than two inches deep across vast stretches of the course. I didn’t know if I was going to jeopardize my feet by trying to run while they were numb. I did remember that there were two lightly-graveled roads which we would have to run across during the completion of each lap, and I wondered how I would cross those roads bare-footed.

I felt confused and handicapped, but heck! The race had started and I was the last man off the line already, so I couldn’t really afford to stand there looking for answers. The next thing I knew I was splashing after the horde of splattering, squishing runners, most of whom were already being covered with flecks of thrown mud.

Quickly, I resolved myself to my fate, and fought within myself to get a grip on the task at hand. Make that, the task at foot, right? The leaders of the race already had a large advantage on me, and I was the last man around the first turn. This absolutely did not seem to be a good idea.

I struggled to get my muscles accustomed to the demands which I would have to make of them. My muscles responded with a chilled reluctance of their own. I really worried about breaking a foot or an ankle, as I couldn’t feel a thing in either foot. It was like I was not there below my ankles, and my ankles themselves were thinking about disappearing too.

Something inside me seemed to be trying to tell me to run faster, and that if I would just run faster I could get my blood temperature up even in the lower extremities. That didn’t seem likely to me, but it was the only thing I could think to do, so I narrowed my focus into trying to pass all the runners I could as quickly as I could.

I’ll confess this now, though I would have never said it when I was that young, but at this early stage of this particular race, with my feet numb and my ankles hurting bitterly from the cold and wetness, I actually got the thought into my head that the straightest line that could be acceptably drawn from where I was splashing about in an absurd display of angry weather to the gym’s warmth and it’s hot showers was to complete this race.

I knew I would have to run all three laps before I could make a bee-line for the warmth of the showers. Then it dawned on me…..the sooner I got finished with the race, the sooner I could get relief, could get dry and warm and clean. I sped up, encouraged by thinking about hot showers.

At about half-way around the large property which composed the “lap” that we’d run three times in this race was the first of the gravel roads we’d have to run across. As I neared it, I was running past disheartened runners who had already figured that this was a bad joke without reason or ending, and were more resigned to plodding submissively along their way to the finish line while taking every precaution not to slip down into the water or mud. Though I could completely understand their thinking, and could even share it with them, it had occurred to me to help myself out of this misery by hurrying! I came upon the road and literally closed my eyes, fearing what the gravel would do to my bare feet.

That was when a saving realization hit upon me. My feet couldn’t feel a thing, so they did not know if I abused them by coming down hard on rocks. I knew then that I would cross the next road with my eyes open, trying to keep off the larger or more jagged rocks as I picked my way on the run across the gravel. Amazingly, I got across the road with complete absence of pain, though I knew that when my feet came back to full feeling I was likely to find that I’d achieved various injuries, including stone-bruise.

Well, I cheerfully thought to myself, that will be then, but this is now, so I’m letting it all out and running for my quickest return to a hot shower and a pile of warm dry towels!

As the pack came round to the starter’s line to complete lap one of the three-lap race, I had gained on the leaders noticeably. To my surprise, I noticed that there were perhaps thirty or forty parents who had been able to make it there on short notice. It was not the kind of crowd which had watched me get myself disqualified at the Turkey Day Run, but still it was encouraging to see some people there in support of this poor-weathered madness.

Then I saw her. My mother was standing under an umbrella and held up head-high to my view my red leather running shoes. She was just at the edge of the race lane, leaning toward me and hollering my name. Dad had not been able to get off work to come. Lynn had still been in school across town. Mother had on a long coat and rubber boots, so she looked secure and fine. I did not slow down one whit when I saw the shoes, knowing already that it was too late to help my feet and also knowing that the minute it would take to put them on would just set back the moment of my relief by that much time.

What was more, after completing one lap it had occurred to me that after all, I was running just fine and was gaining on the leaders. I smiled a shrug at her as I ran past, loving her for caring for me the way she did, and I kept on running.

Seeing her caused me to think of several things at once, and one of them was my father’s initial reaction to my having been fouled in that race a month earlier. He had actually wanted me to avenge myself for that cheap shot by Runo, even though such notions were totally opposed to the spirituality that he and I both understood was our chosen way to view life here on earth.

“Hmm”, I thought, “dad’s human after all!”

So the idea came into my mind about half-way around lap two that Runo’s feet probably didn’t feel any better than mine did, shoes or no, and that even though he had the advantage of spikes, I had a bit more flesh on my bones than he carried on his, and that meant that I might have an advantage after all by having a better blood circulation under these conditions than he did.

Using such thoughts for fuel, I commanded my legs to get with the program even more, and I began to drive myself to exceed the whole mess of this race and give Runo a dose of payback. I literally began kicking before I got past half-way around that second lap. I was now passing people coming and going. In this race, I didn’t use up good energy talking to them as I passed them.

When I crossed the line for the second time I was less than twenty yards behind Runo, who was alone but for two men, one of whom was my friend and team-mate. I could hear my mother’s voice shrilly commanding me to run harder, to catch “that boy”! He had five and six yards respectively on a boy from Central and my friend. I kept kicking, suddenly enjoying the notion of flying past him before he could adjust to having heard my footfalls splashing behind him.

I reached inside myself even more deeply and coaxed my legs to fly faster yet. I waved at my mother when I went past her and then fixed my gaze on the back of Runo’s head and never took my eyes off him again until I drove past him between the second and third turns on the third lap. Well I knew that I would not want to be caught ever again running side by side with him.

As I passed him, I caught him by surprise. He didn’t even try to throw a kick into his stride. It was almost like he was already beaten by the cold and wet conditions which had given every runner there misery and various degrees of pain. I glanced at the side of his face and saw amid the splash-mud flecks covering his face and the front of his jersey an eye of blue in a grimace of determined and sustained combat with pain. He was struggling valiantly, but had felt the futility in escaping the pain. He would not quit, however, though he couldn’t even hide his pain as I pulled aside him.

I fairly skipped past the guy and never let up. I don’t to this day know how I managed to “kick” for a mile and a half, but that is what I did. I finished the race, ribbon across my chest, more than twenty seconds ahead of Runo. I waved my mother toward the gym and without slowing down more than necessary to keep upright as I turned left off the course, I headed as quickly as I could into the gym’s saving warmth.

I was in the warm shower when Coach came in to get me. He was all pissed off. “Boy, didn’t you want that championship trophy, or what? Get your damned shorts back on and get back out there and let them give you the goddam thing. Hurry your ass up! They’re all waiting on you!” With that he made his exit and slammed the door behind him.

I had not thought about a presentation of the trophies. I grinned. It was beginning to dawn on me that not only had I beaten Runo, I had also won the Memphis city championship!

Wet, I hurriedly struggled to get the sweat-pants over my burning feet and calves, which were feigning fire as the blood crept back into them. I slipped my feet into my regular school shoes and grabbed a sweatshirt to pull over my head as I headed out the door to a moment which only victors know. I was shy about being the center of attention, but kept a straight face and spoke only a brief “thank you very much” as they passed the winner’s trophy to me. I only briefly posed for the newspaper reporters’ cameras. As quickly as good graces would permit, I headed back to the luxury of that hot shower.

Just as I neared the entrance, I noticed some movement under the grandstands which stood outside the gym. I looked in that direction and saw something I’ll never forget. There was Runo, under the bleachers, and his dad was with him. Runo was crying. Worse, his dad was cursing him! Chewing him out for letting some little “unknown” from Treadwell beat his ass in the rain.

As I watched this pitiful scene while continuing to walk toward the entrance to the gym, I saw Runo’s dad grab his upper arm and shake him mercilessly, cursing him all the while. I didn’t want to embarrass Runo by letting him see me seeing him, so I hastily made my way on into the gym. Suddenly, some things made sense to me. I felt very sorry for him, and hated that it had to be him I beat to get my win.

That would not be the last of such displays by his father I would witness in the coming year, and I always felt badly whenever I had to race Runo, knowing that if I beat him he would catch hell from his dad. How cruel, I thought….

My team-mates caught me in the gym, and there was much bally-hooing and horseplay. One of their own had done it! They excitedly told me something I had missed. As luck would have it, I had set a new course record. They were all in awe, knowing that my feet had been numb before the race even started.

To win it was one thing. To trounce Runo grandly was another. But to do those things and run that course faster than any runner ever had before, lopping more than five seconds off the old record time, well, that was cause for serious celebration. Also, though the team did not win the event’s team competition, finishing second behind Overton High, Runo’s East High team came in a miserable sixth place in team totals, and that was yet another reason to celebrate.

As we finally calmed ourselves, I noticed Coach standing aside waiting for us to blow off our joyful steam. I walked over to him and instead of receiving his congratulations, all I got was his declaration that I could have run the race better. “Boy, some day you’re gonna wake up and listen to me, dammit! You started your kick several minutes before you were supposed to! I’ve told you about doing that.”

“You’re right, Coach,” I said, letting my eyes fall to his feet.

“Awright. What you did out there today could have been better. Maybe next year you’ll do it right.” Then he grinned just a bit. “Boy, if I could get you to drink it, which I know damned well I can’t, I’d buy you a beer and try just one more time to talk you out of this nonsense about that Seventh-day Assinism or whatever it is you call your private little excuse for keeping me from having the best damned cross-country team I ever had. Damn, but you make me mad!”

With that he turned and walked away. As he was leaving the showers, I hollered after him, “Hey, Coach! What if it was my God who gave me the ability to win that race?”

I’m not sure if he heard me or not.

Exiting the showers, I found my mother, who by now had made friends with several other parents who were waiting to take their sons home. She was quite pleased, and had a warm hug for me, as well as another dose of Coach-like admonition. “Young man, if I ever catch you running barefoot in this kind of weather again I’ll blister your bottom!” She smiled as she said it.

I looked in my heart at the contrast between what I lived with at home and what Runo must live with at his home. I felt heavy in my heart, despite the events of this most memorable day.

In the car on the way home, I told my mother that I was convinced that God had helped me win that race, to repay me in kind for keeping my heart pure and focused on His love and wonderment, for honoring his divine laws for mankind.

She agreed that that could be true, that perhaps the Lord had indeed blessed me in this way as a way of showing that God was pleased with my devotion. She believed that then, and she believes that to this day. Her God has never changed, and she’s lived her whole life as a testament of her God’s goodness.

I truly believed that back then, just as she and dad did. It made sense to me back then, and it fit with all I’d ever been taught.

But that was over fifty years ago, long before I learned that there is another sort of race going on.

The following Spring I ran on the track and field team. Mile run and two-mile relay. Sometimes an 880. I picked up some medals in the season-ending championships and at the West Tennessee regionals. I ran cross-country the next year in high school, and then for a season in college, before I dropped out of college in 1965 and joined the U.S. Marines to help my government stamp out the communist threat over in some little un-heard-of country called Viet Nam.

The preacher at my church seemed convinced that America had to fight that war, but assured we young men of enlistment age that God might smile more readily upon the boy who declined as a conscientious-objector. Still, he made a case about honoring one’s country, and I felt like for the first time I had opportunity to make a decision on my own. I thought I’d volunteer before they drafted me, and I also knew I would request duty in Viet Nam when the time came.

As has always been my way, I learn as I go, and Viet Nam taught me more than I wanted to learn.

I no longer can believe in the God of the Seventh-day Adventist religion. I haven’t been able to swallow that since I got home from the war all in one piece.

In fact, I can’t believe in a Loving Heavenly Father at all. For decades now I’ve missed the comfort of blind faith and the needed presumption which comes to all persons who can believe above all in their God.

Oh, I believe in goodness, just as it’s found in the hearts of decent folk like my parents. That’s there, alright. But today it causes me to laugh in scorn when I recall how I came to be so programmed back then, back in ’61, 62, and ’63, as to believe that a distant God on some impeccable throne of everlasting joy and glory could care about just which kid won which long-distance race, but couldn’t bother to care at all if the cutest little two-year-old Vietnamese girl you ever saw, a precious sweetness as innocent as morning’s gold in a sunrise, had to be cognizant with every nerve in her screaming body as the White Phosphorous with which we bombed her got all over her skin and burned its way unstoppably into her flesh in unbelievable pain, burned all the way to the bones of her body. Any God who can stop that, but doesn’t stop it, is not worthy of my worship.

These days, I am more like an Agnostic who doesn’t know — and knows he doesn’t know. I know that without knowing, I’m in no position to teach or preach anything to anyone. My mind is not plugged by beliefs. My will, which pulses finer vibrations in the neural cells of my beating heart, commands me to ask Life’s most grave and intense questions.

Who am I? What am I? Whence cometh I? For what purpose am I here?

History attests that thinking people throughout all past ages have explored an indefinitude of possible expressions of infinite variations of movement in form energized by an electromagnetic field consisting of gradations of vibratory planes of invisible dancing frequencies. Am I an electrical being? Is electricity, even as refined as sparks of consciousness in the dulled fields of Psyche, the ether itself, the philosopher’s stone, the aurum-non-vulgi, the Saint’s Heaven, the Buddhist’s Nirvana, the Hindu’s Satori, etc. and etc.?

For you, maybe there is a Loving Heavenly Father. But I’ve known throughout all my grown life that I’m making do without the man upstairs on whom I had depended throughout my youth. I can’t say he does not exist, nor can I say he does. Again I repeat — I don’t know, and I know that I don’t know. The only way to know anything is to be able to prove it, and even as Christianity itself will concur, proving the existence of God is an exercise in folly and futility. God exists only in the minds of those who choose to believe God exists. It is called living on faith.

I miss that comfort and dearly wish there were once again a higher power which dwelt inside the temple of my heart, sustaining me and celebrating his creation through my heart.

Instead there is this fierce and cold course ahead of me and a foe who started before the starter’s gun was fired. There is only the running to catch and pass my own defeat as that embodiment of insanity now wears my own colors, posing like a team-mate on my side while taking from me the very wing-heeled shoes of personal liberty.

Today I think that there is a race being run by all good people of conscience, and the course is staked out in the structure of our daily lives. We can win that race by living truthfully and responsibly, by admitting that the tax dollars we send up to any national government these days are buying murder, coercion, and abuse all around the world.

We can win that race by reminding Caesar just what is and what is not Caesar’s, and by taking the power of We The People back from the hands of Statist-minded political darkness and socialistic evil, and re-establishing our original Constitution as the compact created by sovereign nation-state republics which created the Federal government, and demanding criminal trials for all the guilty cheaters, such as the high board members of the Federal Reserve, Inc., or the Justice Department, the CIA, the CFR, the NSA, FEMA, and all their tiresome, guilty, evil ilk.

Isn’t it time for criminal trials for criminal deeds against the American people?

Can there be justice, finally, for the more than one hundred nations world-wide in which his CIA has spread the trap of Corporate Imperialism clandestinely and with much evil, much man-made misery, much destruction, much death?

Nowadays I’m totally committed to running that race with as much dedication as I used to run for my Lord’s pleasure in happier, simpler times. Having lost my ability to believe in the God of my parents, I next had to lose the ability to believe in the government their God supposedly had a hand in establishing.

There is a race to preserve Liberty in America while there’s still a little time left in which to save it. I don’t know how other Liberty-minded sovereigns would approach their work for Liberty, but as for me, I’m tackling it the only way I know how, by looking inside myself, within myself, knowing what is there and what is not there. Tasting freedom. Honoring Liberty. Breathing deeply and setting a pace which will hopefully serve to outrun the goons my government may send to punish me for refusing to pay their taxes, using the way of the runner for all I’m worth.

My eyes are fixed on a length of ribbon, but it’s not the sort of ribbon one sees at finish lines. I see the turning, weaving, winding length of ribbon which we used to, a half-Century ago in America, call Liberty. That noble ribbon which all Americans back then felt across their breast like a wrapping about their hearts when they reflected on the being of an American. That ribbon which made winners of us all. That ribbon. That race.
Want to run with me?
~

Part 1– https://thementalmilitia.org/2024/08/29/way-of-the-runner/

Part 2 — https://thementalmilitia.org/2024/08/31/way-of-the-runner-part-2/

Part 3 — https://thementalmilitia.org/2024/08/31/way-of-the-runner-part-3/

Thank You For Reading.