Yesterday, I watched a YouTube video of some people, mostly young men, freerunning through a variety of urban landscapes. It really is a stunning display of kinesthetic brilliance. Every movement is a confluence of explosive power and surgical precision. A banal plaza takes on a whole dimension of danger as the runners take to it. Planters become launch pads. The span between buildings becomes a place to showcase otherwise invisible wings. A twenty-five foot drop is merely the fastest way to the bottom floor of a building — staircases and elevators are for the amateurs. Every frame of the video is stunning and every moment a reason to cease breathing. The answer to the question: “How is freerunning (or as it’s sometimes called, parkour) supposed to look?” was right before me. It was a display of virtuosity and control that was unmistakably brilliant.
Yet, the internet is also full of videos featuring imitators who lack not courage, but ability. Yes, there is a bit of schadenfreude within all of us – a not-so-admirable longing to see people suffer just a bit. We don’t want long term pain, nor harm. But, any person attempting to show off by jumping over a trashcan from the unstable platform of a plastic lawnchair may be begging to suffer a momentarily bruised ego. These imitators (at least in the videos that have captured their shortcomings) attempt something that is not executed in the manner it was intended. They demonstrate that there is a long way, often, between where we intend to be and where we actually are. That difference, in the case of failed parkour, is comically painful.
Even the rest of us, those who will never attempt a backflip from atop a fire hydrant or test how well we fly by throwing ourselves out of a second story window, understand the principle at work. In our relationships, like all things, we grasp how things are supposed to work. When they don’t work in the way they ought — when the reality of the way things actually are is different than the way we imagined them to work, we experience pain:
When a girlfriend stabs us in the back… When a father’s love isn’t fatherly… When resentment and bitterness become the texture of what was once a marriage of intimacy… When sons and daughters run away… When fists and words poisonously laced with anger are wielded not with carelessness, but with cold skill… We hurt… because that (whatever that is) isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.
We need healing from those things. This week, we’ll wrap up our ART of RELATIONSHIPS series with a particular focus on healing and mending the brokenness of our past. We’ll acknowledge that it is God who mends broken things (like us). We’ll call on His power to accomplish the work we cannot do on our own. So, don’t miss this week. Bring friends who are in need of supernatural help and healing. Come eagerly expecting, hopeful God will work in the restoration of people in our midst – that things will become, if only by a degree, a bit closer to the way they were intended to be.
See you soon,
Jeff
