The Runner Who Couldn't Run

Over the past few days, I've found myself revisiting an old song.

Be Not Always is a haunting lamentation written from a place of global grief. Born out of watching war, poverty and the suffering of children across the world, it pleads for the pain to stop. It mourns humanity's strange habit of believing that if we simply wait long enough, somehow things will get better.

Its a heavy, sweeping song, but one line detached itself from the weight of the world and settled onto mine.

“Time has made promises.... just promises.”

Michael was singing about history, about the cruel illusion that humanity naturally heals with time. But sitting in the silence of my own home, listening to my body fail me, I realized the lie of time isn't only a global tragedy. It's a deeply personal one.

I wasn't grieving the world. I was grieving every tomorrow I had counted on: the healthier version of myself I assumed I'd eventually become, the books I'd someday finish, the trips I'd someday take, the conversations I'd someday have, and the woman I believed I would eventually grow into if I just had enough time....

Lately, life has brought me to some deep valleys.

Not just physically, although that is certainly part of it. I have been so tired and unwell that even ordinary tasks sometimes feel overwhelming. My body simply doesn't seem willing to cooperate with all the things my mind and heart still long to do.

And there are so many things I want to do. I want to travel. Dance. Gather with family and friends without calculating how much it will cost me afterward. I want to write everything that's been percolating inside me, even on the days when pain or brain fog make words feel impossibly far away.

The desire hasn't disappeared. If anything, that almost makes it harder.

There is a particular kind of shame that comes from wanting desperately to be useful, present and engaged while feeling as though you can't. I look around at everything I should be doing, everything I could be doing if I only had more strength, and I begin keeping an invisible tally

What did I actually accomplish today?

Who needed me that I didn't have enough energy for?

What am I falling behind on?

How much time have I wasted?

Why can't I just get up and do it?

I know intellectually that illness isn't laziness. I know a person's worth is never measured by productivity. I would never look at someone else who was struggling physically and calculate their value according to how much they accomplished.

Yet I have been perfectly willing to do exactly that to myself.

Underneath the fatigue is something even more painful:

I am afraid of not becoming what I could have become.

Over the years I've tried so many things. Another healing protocol. Another insight. Another spiritual approach. Another plan for strengthening my family. Another writing schedule. Another promise to myself that this would finally be the season I finished the book, the painting, the decluttering.

Sometimes those things helped a bit. Sometimes they didn't. But almost every one of them carried the same hope:

Maybe this is the thing that changes everything.

When enough of those hopes remain unanswered, something subtle begins to happen.

You don't stop dreaming.

You stop expecting.

That's why another lyric from the song is been echoing through my mind:

“To have nothing....
To dream something....
Then lose hoping....”

I don't think he's grieving the existence of dreams. He's grieving what repeated disappointment can do to hope itself. Eventually you stop saying, “Maybe this time.” Instead, you begin to wonder, “Why would this time be any different?”

A few mornings ago, I found myself thinking about people throughout history who carried enormous desires to do good. People who believed they had something meaningful to contribute. People who spent themselves trying to bless the world, yet died without ever seeing their hopes realized.

That thought wrecked me.

Not because I believe their lives were meaningless. I don't. But because I could suddenly feel the heartbreak of loving something so deeply, giving yourself to it so completely, and still leaving this life with your work unfinished.

It brought me back once again to that lyric:

“Time has made promises.... just promises.”

Perhaps that's what hurts. We assume there will always be enough tomorrows. Enough strength. Enough opportunities. Then illness, circumstance or even death reminds us that time never actually made those promises.

We did.

I couldn't stay with that thought for very long. It hurt way too much.

Then yesterday, a roadrunner appeared in our yard.

He was injured. Something was wrong with one of his legs. He wasn't moving normally, and I immediately felt a wave of empathy for him. I wanted to help, so I went inside to gather a few supplies.

When I approached, he backed away.

Since he couldn't run, he hopped.

Then somehow that injured little roadrunner hopped, fluttered his wings and made it over the fence into my neighbor's yard.

I stood there staring at the fence.

A roadrunner. A creature whose defining characteristic is built directly into its name.

A runner.

And he couldn't run. A tragedy.

At least, that's what I first thought.

But that wasn't the tragedy.

The tragedy would have been if he had somehow concluded that because he couldn't run, he had stopped being a roadrunner.

He hadn't.

His injury hadn't rewritten his identity. It had only changed his pace.

When running wasn't possible, he hopped.

My daughter laughed and affectionately called him the “road-hopper.” I chuckled. But the truth is, he was never a road-hopper. He was always a roadrunner.

He simply happened to be hopping that day.

I don't believe every bird or cloud contains a secret message from heaven, but I do believe God sometimes uses ordinary things to get our attention. He knows what each of us has been wrestling with. He knows what will make us stop and look.

And somehow, that little bird had become a mirror.

Maybe there are seasons when we can't move the way we once did. Maybe sometimes the thing that feels most essential to who we are is precisely the thing we temporarily cannot do.

Maybe running becomes hopping. Maybe moving becomes resting. Maybe surviving becomes today's assignment.

None of those adjustments change who we are.

Watching that wounded bird, I realized something:

The greatest tragedy isn't that the runner couldn't run.
The greatest tragedy would have been if the runner believed she had stopped being a runner.

That was the lie I had been believing.

The little roadrunner didn't promise I'd run again tomorrow. Neither does time. For a long while, I think I've been asking time to keep promises it never actually made: another season, another year, better health, more strength. Someday everything would finally begin.

But time was never the author of those promises.

In fact, there is only one promise time has always kept.

Death.

The song ends with the haunting words:

“Death promises.”

None of us escapes that appointment. Every one of us will leave this world with conversations unfinished, dreams incomplete, prayers still being answered, work left for someone else to carry.

Death is time's one certainty.

Strangely, I don't find that thought as frightening as I once did. I find it clarifying.

Because if death is inevitable, then perhaps the better question isn't:

Did I accomplish everything I hoped?

But:

Who was I becoming while I hoped?

Or maybe, in my case:

Who was I becoming while I hopped?

God's greatest promise was never that I would always run. It was never that every dream would be fulfilled before I died. It was never that I'd check every item off my list.

His promise was something deeper: that suffering cannot erase my identity, that weakness cannot cancel my calling and that He who began a good work in me intends to finish it, even if the path looks nothing like the one I imagined.

A runner who cannot run is still a runner.

So if today I hop instead of run, then I will hop. If tomorrow requires rest, then I will rest. Neither changes who I am.

My pace may change. My path may change. And perhaps not every dream will be realized exactly the way I once imagined.

But if this slower journey leaves me more compassionate, more patient, more dependent upon God and more able to recognize another wounded traveler, then maybe I wasn't merely trying to reach a destination.

Perhaps, all along, God was shaping the runner.

Time has made promises.
But God has made better promises.

---

Behind the Music

Released in 1984 “Be Not Always” is one of Michael Jackson's most fragile, stripped-back ballads. Born out of his heartbreak watching global poverty, war and the suffering of children across the world while on tour, the song was not shaped like a conventional pop hit. It unfolds more like a prayer or lament, holding up a mirror to humanity's repeated failures and to the empty belief that time alone will heal the wounds we refuse to confront.