DNF

The Cross and the Finish Line

I

came to with a blur of faces standing over me. “Let me finish,” I mumbled. “Please, please let me finish.” I tried to get up from the stretcher but was gently pushed back down.

“We need to make sure you’re okay first,” someone told me. “We need a doctor to clear you.” I nodded and lay back down. I told myself that I would be fine, that I just needed to start running again.

A man who I assumed was the doctor came over to my stretcher. He looked me over. He asked the nurses, “She threw up?”

“Yeah.”

“Temperature?”

“103.”

“Absolutely not. She’s not going back out there.”

“Honey, we can’t let you finish the race today, okay? We’re sending you to the hospital.”

At this I started crying, hard. “Please let me finish,” I begged. “I have to finish—I have to.”

“Honey, you’re pretty sick. You can’t go back and run right now.”

By that point I knew I wasn’t being entirely rational, so I laid my head back down, feeling the uncomfortable warmth of the tears on my face. So into an ambulance, away from the course, to the hospital—not the finish line I had hoped for.

People talk about a runner’s high, and there is nothing quite like finishing a marathon. In spite of crippling soreness for days afterwards, you feel like you can do anything. I’d been training for this—my third marathon—since June, and now that it was October, I was eager for that “finish line feeling.”

But this particular race had not started well. It began in a downpour, we runners wading through a flooded road for a mile to the start line. By the time I started running, my clothes and shoes were already soaked through, and each step made an unpleasant squishing noise. This wasn’t going to be a fun 26.2.

At mile six I had to stop on the side of the road to unload the contents of my stomach. Whatever fuel I had consumed was gone. I told myself I’d be fine. Plenty of people get sick during a race, and at least now, I thought, I was lighter. I ran back onto the road in the pouring rain, thinking about how, at the finish line, I’d proudly reveal that I’d dealt with this mishap and had been able to finish even so. That thought was the only fuel I thought I needed.

At mile ten I drank some water, telling myself I was only dizzy because I needed to rehydrate. At the station they were handing out orange slices, and I felt nauseous just looking at them. For the first time that day I felt I might not actually be able to finish. I quickly waved the thought away, muttering, “Mind over matter. I can push through this. I’m tougher than this.”

By mile thirteen, the rain had slowed to a dull trickle, and the sun brought the temperature to a humid, suffocating 82 degrees. I felt horrible. The wet clothes clung heavily to my skin. I looked down and realized I was sloshing through a puddle higher than my ankles. My fellow runners had all swerved to avoid it, and I hadn’t even noticed. I waded onward, though it felt more like a stagger than a jog.

At mile sixteen someone was rolling me over on my back from where I had fallen. I tried to sit up but couldn’t. My face felt like it had caught on fire; whether from the heat, embarrassment, or fever, I wasn’t sure. “Get her some water,” someone said. I drank, then coughed it up.

All I wanted was to finish the race. My pride didn’t care about the fever or dizziness. I didn’t want to fail at what I had set out to do. All that mattered was that I prove myself and finish the race. But a growing ache on my side reminded me that I had fallen hard on the cement, that something in me had broken down, that I had collapsed.

My little crew of friends met me at the hospital, one of them offering a carton of goldfish crackers, but I didn’t want to eat. I was given fluids, my fever went down, and the hospital sent me home. The triumphant brunch my friends had planned was graciously canceled. In the end, I quietly returned to the house, no big triumph, no medal around my neck, just me knowing that I now had a “DNF” (“Did Not Finish”) next to my name on the online roster.

The morning after felt like waking from a nightmare, only to realize it had all happened. There were bruises and scrapes from my fall, and even after I healed physically it would take me far longer to mentally process the pain of my disappointment and failure.

It was no secret that I’d been training. On social media I’d proudly announce to the whole world whenever I completed 20-plus mile runs, which made the admission of the collapse that much more humbling. People’s reactions were nothing but kind. The fact that I had trained at all, they’d say, was an accomplishment in and of itself. But no one trains for months, slogs through long August runs, without hoping to reach the finish line, and in that I’d fallen short of the mark.

Life went on. As it turned out, the world didn’t hold a grudge against my failure the way I did. On the surface I made light of it, even laughing about it at times. But I looked at the pullover I had received for signing up for the race and shoved it to the bottom of the drawer. You didn’t earn it, I thought. You don’t get to wear it. You failed.

I was on the phone with a friend, walking her through the details of the race, when I said, “So, yup, I didn’t finish.”

“It’s interesting,” she pointed out, “that you keep using that phrase, and that Christ’s final words on the cross were ‘it is finished.’ Maybe He finished so you didn’t have to?”

Awkward laugh. “Yeah, maybe,” I said. At the time I thought, “What on earth does the cross have to do with this?” But in hindsight I can see that this race had a lot to do with my sense of self-worth, and that my sense of selfworth had a lot to do with Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. She had a good point after all.

Still, I wanted to be the one to finish. I wanted the recognition. I wanted to be strong enough, tough enough, resilient enough. But the truth was, my own strength, toughness, and resilience were not enough—I wasn’t enough—and my pride was still grappling against that fact.

It’s in Daniel 5 where the Babylonian King Belshazzar is told he has “been found wanting.” He is sitting at a banquet of glory and splendor—much how I had imagined my post-race brunch would be—when writing literally appears on the wall. Daniel is called in to interpret the writing and tells the king he has not humbled himself and has set himself up against the Lord of Heaven. The writing signifies an end to his reign; it signifies that he has been weighed on scales and is found wanting.

In the chapter just before, Nebuchadnezzar is similarly humbled. In his arrogance and pride, he becomes like a beast of the field, “eating grass like cattle.” But when he is restored to his right mind, Nebuchadnezzar praises God, professing that “all [God’s] ways are just, and those who walk in pride he is able to humble.” Praising God after an experience like that…that’s something that only God can bring about. The day after my race, I was not thinking about getting on my knees and thanking God for humbling me.

When you’re doggedly pursuing the wrong thing, have you ever noticed how painful it is to give it up? Acknowledging your shortcomings feels a lot more like a surrender than a victory, because it is. But it’s not a surrender to a God eager to laugh and pounce on your failings; it’s to a God who wants to build you up again, only, this time, to be more like him. He will stoop to meet us where we’ve fallen, but will not leave us there.

I believe that race was God asking me to lay down my pride and run toward him. And running toward Him felt a lot like turning around and backtracking down a road I’d come so far already. It felt like God had suddenly pried my hands off an idol. I had been clenching it so tightly that I hadn’t realized I was hurting myself in the process. I pushed and pushed until all that could have stopped me was the collapse of my body.

Like Nebuchadnezzar, I was brought low, my body “drenched with the dew of heaven.” For months I had been measuring myself by my ability to finish the race. Oh, how often do we measure ourselves by these human scales? We place our value in all sorts of things—our relationships, our productivity, our salaries—and when we fall short in these areas we are left devastated. We’re found wanting on our self-made scales.

But God’s scales are different from ours. They are completely upside-down. The first are last, the last are first. After the marathon, the pressure that I had put on myself was released, my pride replaced with meekness. The race was a worldly failure that did me a world of spiritual good, even though it hurt.

The life of the Christian is primarily marked not by triumph but failure. The humbling truth is that we fall short all the time. Recognizing that is kind of the first step; the second is knowing that our success is going to look far different than how we’re imagining it. I saw a race, another medal to hang alongside the others, another #humblebrag to post online—but God saw a moment to refine and mold me. It’s not through medals and glory that He does His best work, but through humbling moments of collapse.

This is most powerfully illustrated in the turning point of the Christian story, when God comes to commune with us, not through triumph and glory but through His death on a cross. His death reminds us that those of us who do not finish have one who finishes in our place.

I’m back to running again, but there is a lightness to it now. The pressure to perform may return occasionally, but I see a lot more grace in each run—there is something steadier than my own frail human strength, and I am learning to lean on it. Whatever races I may run in the future, I know that my value doesn’t rest at the finish line. I know that the race has been run. I know that it is finished.