Running, Routine, and Renewal - Practicing Sabbath in Adulthood

The Nashville Fellows program is all about building habits. “Living well,” practicing “vocational ministry,” and “engaging in conversation with curiosity” are all buzzwords we hear to promote a more fruitful life for God’s people in this city. And these habits are all great—they are needed to recover a lost sense of Christian flourishing and the good life in a secular, post-modern culture. But I have taken time on my own this year to rediscover a more practical, long-lost discipline: running.

I ran a lot in high school. I thrived on my cross country team, and I joined the track team my junior year after finally admitting that I was not cut out for baseball. I took time on Saturdays to run through the woods and neighborhoods around my hometown of Durham, NC. After enough time, the hobby quickly became a vitalizing way to steward my body and mind while enjoying God’s wonderful creation.

College in its unorganized and overinvolved culture hit me like a truck, and I quickly fell out of the discipline. Amidst all the studies, extracurricular commitments, and spontaneous Cookout runs, I fought a tremendously uphill battle to even get a few runs in per week. Living in the rhythms of routine and Sabbath—a core tenant of this program—were quickly put on the backburner, if not discarded altogether. Although I fought for time to run, read God’s word, and pray during my last two years, I would experience long draughts in my physical exercise. When I finally graduated I felt burnt out and exhausted by my lack of structure and discipline.

But I was still determined. At just the right time (thank the Lord), I joined a nine month program that gives young men and women—fresh out of college and oblivious to the tacit guidelines of life—the skills to practice routine and Sabbath as adults. Nashville Fellows equips a bunch of clueless 22- and 23-year-olds with the knowledge and skills to thrive in their spiritual, professional, and communal lives by showing them how to practically form healthy habits of apprenticeship under Jesus—habits that will be their constant bedrock amidst the storms of life.

I capitalized on this new structure of life and began running again .

Practically speaking, developing the habit has been a challenge. Working at St. Paul Christian Academy means getting to work at 7:30, and I’m often not leaving until after-school clubs are finished between 4:30 and 5:30. There is rarely any time to run once school is done, so I have accepted the only alternative: running first thing in the morning—in the dark.

It was a struggle at first. For most days in the school year, the sun does not rise until around 6:30 or even 7:00, meaning I’m running in pitch-black night. And more often than not, it’s cold. There have been too many mornings to count where just getting up to run has felt like an insurmountable chore. And even when I did, I would barely call it fun. Who wants to run in the dark?

But over the last few weeks, the Lord has blessed me with a simple yet powerful fact of nature. As our globe slowly tilts its Northern Hemisphere back towards the sun, I have witnessed earlier and earlier sunrises. Nowadays, at the end of this program, I run no longer through lingering shadows under the lonely and distant stars; but through powerful rays of the warm and glorious sun. I no longer hear the callous whisper of a cold and bitter wind, but the excited song of a bird offering greetings to its neighbors. The difference has been (forgive me) night and day. I have endured the proverbial “valley of the shadow of death.” My spirits have truly lifted.

My year as a whole reflects this phenomenon. I have run through the dark of night throughout the program, but as I near the end I can confidently say that I enter the light of day. In King David’s words, “weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning” (Psa 30:5b).

But it’s important to understand that while my circumstances have changed (and will keep changing), the running—the routine—has not.

And that is what Fellows has been for me. In a year with LOTS of change, these habits have been an anchor that rest me in God’s truth, goodness, beauty, and love. In the loss of family and friends, whether from death or distance, the Fellows community and my habits of running, reading God’s word, and praying every day have given me the power to move forward with hope in a broken world. If nothing else, I look back with gratitude for a program that sustained me with its rhythms while encouraging me to develop my own.

I have neared the finish line of this year, but soon I will start a new race. Or rather, several—call it “a fulltime job,” “living without a host family,” or simply “adulthood.” Regardless of what I run, these habits will continue to be what sustain me, until at long last I can join the apostle Paul in saying “I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Tim 4:7).

Sam Gould, Class 13
Hometown: Durham, NC
Samford University Graduate