​4 years ago today, I ran my last marathon. The memory of the pain I was experiencing in that finish line moment has long subsided, but the lesson - the much needed lesson - has carried on.

I ran the marathon with my friend Tiffany. It was her first marathon. She'd committed to running marathons before this one in 2021, but it just never happened. This one, though - she was determined to let nothing stand in her way of becoming forever a marathoner.

Throughout the training leading up to this, she would frequently say, "Whatever it takes."

And I dare say, that day, we did whatever it took.

For many reasons, most meaningful metaphor for life has become the marathon.

Maybe that’s because the marathon mirrors the way life exposes us.
It reveals every weakness, every fear, every corner of ourselves we’d rather not confront. There’s nowhere to hide at mile 22. Whatever is in you - good or bad - comes out. Trust me!

In many ways, life is the same. We don’t get to skip the hard miles; we just learn to show up for ourselves there.

Maybe it’s because the marathon forces honesty. There’s no pretending your way to 26.2 miles. No shortcut. No façade. Life, especially these last several years, has demanded that same honesty from me - to face my truth instead of pretending I'm strong.

The marathon helped teach me that pretending doesn’t get you to the finish line; truth does.

Maybe it’s because the marathon is a slow becoming, not a single moment. No one accidentally runs a marathon. You become a marathoner long before race day. You become one in the lonely early-morning miles, in the discipline of lacing up when no one is watching, in the quiet promises you keep to yourself.

For me, healing has been that same slow becoming - a thousand small, unseen steps that eventually add up to something that looks like progress.

Maybe it’s because the marathon is where I learned what “capacity” really means. Not capacity as in talent or physical ability, but capacity as in what we can endure, adapt to, and rise from. My first marathon and each after showed me I had more in me than I believed.

Life has shown me the opposite too - that sometimes we have far less than we pretend.

Both truths matter.

Both shape us.

Maybe it’s because the marathon is impossible to run alone.
Even if your feet are the only ones hitting the pavement, you’re carried by the people who trained with you, believed in you, prayed for you, and waited for you. Tiffany’s “whatever it takes” didn’t just get her across the finish line, it got me across too.

I’ve come to realize that's true for most of us - most of our finish lines come the same way: on the strength of the people who stay close when the miles get dark.

Whatever it takes.

Or you know, maybe it’s simply this:

In the marathon, as in life, the goal isn’t to feel good - it’s to keep going. And sometimes “whatever it takes” isn’t about finishing strong. It’s just about not quitting.

I am proud of this 4 year-old memory popping up this morning. Proud of Tiffany and proud of me.

But more than that, I am reminded:

Whatever it takes..... 

​Who they say you are isn’t nearly as important as who you know you are.

Because the truth is, there will always be voices. Voices from your past. Voices from your failures. Voices that sound an awful lot like your fears. And sometimes those voices can sound convincing. Why wouldn't they - they’ve been rehearsed in your head for years.

But what matters most isn’t what you hear. It’s what you agree with.

The moment you agree with the wrong voice, you begin to live out a story that isn’t yours. You start making choices to defend an identity that was never yours in the first place.

How do you defend yourself against that, defend yourself against the noise?

Know who you are.

Because when you know who you are - like REALLY know it - the noise can no longer sway you. No one can apply a mask to a face that refuses to wear one.

Maybe it's our greatest superpower - being sure of who we are. The noise of the world will always be loud, but it only becomes deafening - defeating - when we start to listen to and believe noise that isn't ours to listen to and believe.

It's self-defense.

Defense against ever giving another voice the power to believe they know who you are better than you do.

They don't.

​Nothing lasts forever in this world. That is hard to accept. So hard, in fact, that it's easy to become so focused on the things that have left us that we deprive ourselves of the chance to embrace all that is still to come.

We fixate on all that has left and not on all that is left.

Yes, I'm talking about people and relationships. But it goes beyond that.

How many of us focus on the youthful appearance we once had but has now left us?

How many of us focus on the great job we once had but now has left us?

How many of us focus on the simplicity of the hometown we grew up in but we no longer live in?

How many focus on the financial security we once had that now looks more like paycheck to paycheck?

How many of us are so deeply mourning the loss of what was that we live incapable of seeing - let alone embracing - the possibilities that can be found in all that we have left.

How many of us have heads looking behind, faces painted in loss - and not forward, faces overcome with belief and hope?

And expectation.

Do we expect that life is over because of all that has left?

Or do we expect unexpected beauty coming at us from all that we have left?

Which we expect is a choice:

All that has left.

Or.

All that we have left.

The weekend has left you. I truly hope it was a great one.

But today is the day to begin focusing on all the days you have left.

And from them - create and anticipate beauty.

​Last night, I went to see the movie Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere with my 17-year-old son, Ian. The film tells the story behind Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska, the same year I graduated high school.

Sitting there beside my son, I couldn’t help but notice the collision of timelines: my past and his future, my youth mirrored in the music of a man whose songs have quietly scored the story of my life for decades.

There was something almost spiritual about the experience, watching my son inherit a cultural influence that helped shape me long before he was born. It felt like passing a torch I had no idea I'd one day pass when I first held the baton - awestruck - watching the boss perform for 3 1/2 hours in Cleveland, Ohio in the mid-80s.

What struck me most about the movie wasn’t just the music, it was the pain behind it. Nebraska wasn’t an album Springsteen wanted to write; it was one he had to write. Out of his own darkness - darkness born of a fractured childhood and lifelong depression, he created something raw, unsettling, and true.

As I watched, I saw pieces of myself reflected back on that screen. It frankly made it difficult to watch at times. I saw a man haunted by his past, struggling mightily to enter intimacy and connection, wrestling with ghosts that refused to leave him behind.

I saw the blank-faced isolation of someone who can fill stadiums and still feel desperately unseen.

I wondered, did my son see it too? Did he see and feel the connection between this story he was watching on the screen and the story sitting beside him?

Probably not. How could he? Like most sons his age, he knows fragments of my story - some of the good, the bad, the occasional vulnerability, but not the full arc of how closely my own life has shadowed Springsteen’s.

There would be little reason, really, for the empathy he was surely feeling for that man to reach the man beside him. And in many ways I felt okay with that in the moment.

Springsteen’s struggle was never about fame; it was about survival. He wrote Nebraska as a means of deliverance, a way of giving voice to the darkness that threatened to consume him.

In that way, I understood him completely. Because writing my memoir has felt the same - not something I want to do, but something I have to do. It’s an act of surrender to what’s been buried too long, a way of pulling beauty out of pain, as if that's the sole mission of pain to begin with.

I heard someone say recently that the worst thing we’ve ever done is not bigger than our calling. I’ve been thinking this morning that maybe the worst thing we’ve ever experienced isn’t bigger than our calling either. Our pasts may try to drag us down, but if we’re willing, we can drag them into the future as art, as truth, as connection.

Springsteen’s producers and promoters tried to talk him out of Nebraska. Too dark, too strange, too unlike anything expected of him. But he persisted. He knew this was the work he needed to put into the world.

Watching that persistence stirred something in me - a reminder that some creations are born not out of idea or inspiration or ambition, but out of necessity.

What we create from pain has the power to heal - not just us, but others who see themselves in our stories. That’s the strange redemption of art: it transforms isolation into resonance, sorrow into song, and suffering into togetherness.

Maybe that’s what my son saw last night, even if he wasn't quite old or wise enough to name it; he saw the mysterious way our brokenness can still become a bridge.

A bridge from 1982 to 2025.

A bridge from darkness to light.

A bridge from father to son.

Deliver me from nowhere.

But please, deliver me forward.

​In a recent podcast interview, Steve Bartlett asked Brené Brown, “Have you ever overcome anything?”

She answered, “Yes, I have overcome the belief that I will ever overcome anything.”

Those were timely and powerful words.

I am in the process of writing the final words of my book - the ending. And to be honest with you, I thought this would be the easiest part to write. After this long and often arduous process of digging up and writing the story of my life, I imagined that the words on the other side of all that digging would come easily.

They have not.

Why?

Because I’ve felt pressure - an internal pressure - to find some beautiful way to say look at all I’ve overcome while knowing, deep inside, that in many ways, I’ve overcome nothing.

I’ve wanted so badly to tell the readers who may find themselves in my story, readers who carry demons much like mine, here is how you overcome them.

Yet as I write this ending, here they sit. My demons. As present as they have ever been.

But as Brené Brown seemed to suggest, the story - our story - isn’t about exiling demons as much as it is about getting to know them.

Brown went on to say:

“I have overcome the belief that I will ever arrive. I am grateful for the skills that I have that keep me more aligned with the person, the mom, the partner, the leader I want to be. But I try to stay very mindful that I am scary when I’m scared. That I catastrophize very easily, and that’s painful for everyone around me. And that I don’t need to be liked—because now, the person I’m going to betray last is me. Now the person I’m going to betray last is me.”

And it hit me, what’s the point of writing the most honest version of your life you’ve ever written, only to finish it by hiding again? Why introduce the world to your ugliest and most haunting demons, only to end by giving birth to a few more?

We live in a world that wants every story to have a happy ending.
But does it? Should it?

What if life has nothing to do with arriving and everything to do with learning on the way to never arriving?

What if healing isn’t about getting rid of our demons, but about getting to know them - about becoming, somehow, more human to our demons than they are to us?

And what if the greatest pain a demon can bring is not in haunting us, but in pressuring us to pretend they’re not there, to keep betraying ourselves?

I really have overcome the belief that I will ever overcome anything. That no longer feels like defeat. Because the more I think and write about it, the more I realize - there is no happier ending to a story.

"Now the person I'm going to betray last is me."

​I work for the state of Virginia. Which means, in a sense, the people of Virginia elected a new boss for me last night. A new boss who has a different political party than the old boss.

This isn’t my first time experiencing that kind of change. I’ve been at this job long enough to know that when leadership shifts, so do strategies. Visions. Priorities.

Sometimes policies do, too.

But what doesn’t change, or at least doesn't have to, is my capacity and commitment to show up for the people I serve. At my job and in my life.

What worries me, though - more and more - is how much the way we show up for one another seems to rise and fall with the political tides. Politics has always been an ebb and flow - right and left, up and down, victory and loss. That’s the rhythm of politics.

But should it be the rhythm of our humanity?

I don’t think so.

If we only show up when our side wins, or if we find our hearts demoralized when our side loses, then we miss the bigger calling.

We aren't elected to care, we choose to. It's not a blue choice or a red choice or an anything in between choice.

It's an OUR choice.

I watched the election results with interest last night. But none of that interest was based on figuring out how I am going to show up for the world today.

We put a lot of stock in who is in charge. I get it. Leadership matters. But when who is in charge of a city or a state or a country starts to diminish my knowing that no one but me is in charge of my heart - well, that can become problematic.

It can come to mean my heart has to wait until the next election to fully show up, and that's just now how humanity is supposed to work.

​As with most cultural movements, I am totally lost with this whole 6 7 thing. At least the current teenage/TikTok version of it.

However, there's a much older version of it - about 3000 years old - that I think is pretty relevant today.

Solomon, arguably one of the wisest men to ever live, once wrote in the book of Proverbs:

"There are SIX things the Lord hates, SEVEN that are detestable to him."

Ok.

Wait?

I don't get it.. Is it six or seven, Solomon?

Turns out this whole 6 7 thing was a common Hebrew literary device, deliberate artistry if you will, that says what is about to follow is pretty important. Let me suck you in with a little holy number magic.

So now that you have our attention Solomon, what are the 7 (not six) things that God hates?

God hates:

Prideful eyes: looking down on others; thinking you’re better than people.

A lying tongue: twisting the truth to protect yourself or hurt someone else.

Hands that shed innocent blood: hurting or destroying people who’ve done nothing wrong.

A heart that plots evil: making plans to take advantage of or harm others.

Feet quick to run to do wrong: being eager or impulsive about doing the wrong thing.

A false witness who tells lies: spreading lies that harm someone’s reputation.

A person who stirs up conflict: creating drama, division, or chaos among people who should be united.

So why am I sharing this today?

Well, I guess because it's election day. And campaigning and voting has turned into such a hateful process. Many of us will go out to vote against policies, ideals, and yes - whether it's admitted or not - even people we hate.

I think if we're not careful, we can begin to take up a fight against what we hate out there, and not spend enough time asking ourselves what God might hate about what's going on in here.

In me.

Because when I look at that list of 7 (not six), I mean REALLY look at that list, I'm left considering that I might have too much work to do addressing the things God hates in me to get too caught up in fighting all the things I hate about the world.

That's not to say I can't, shouldn't or won't vote. It's to say don't let voting become a distraction.

The world has a lot to figure out, for sure.

But 6 7 tells me, so do I.

​I don't know if I physically heard it or if my intuition picked up on it, but I received this late night text message from Elliott. 

"I doubt you're awake but this game is crazy."

He was right. I wasn’t awake. Anyone who knows me knows I'd been sound asleep for hours. But one way or another - maybe love - that message woke me up and I caught the end of Game 7 of the World Series. 

There was something deeply satisfying about watching it, knowing that he too, a couple hundred miles away at Virginia Tech, was watching. Somehow, in a world that feels too distant to me, the two of us were sharing the same moment, the same awe, the same game.

After I told him I was now awake and watching, he responded: "we're gonna be up all night." I felt joy in that, mainly because I felt like he too felt joy in that. Like maybe that was the point. 

Sports do that. They pull us together - father and son, fanbases, strangers who will never meet but for a few hours feel like they belong to the same community. The World Series MVP from Japan couldn’t speak a word of English without a translator, but he didn’t need to. His teammates loved him, and he loved them back. 

That kind of love doesn’t require language.

I found it interesting that so many of the post-game interviews, no matter what the language, were filled with one phrase: “I dreamed of this moment as a kid.”

Maybe it’s our dreams that unite us. Latin, Japanese, White, Black - I don’t think we dream in color, but in aspirations.

We dream in hope.

In longing.

In that pull toward something bigger than us.

And maybe that’s the truest kind of connection, not just sharing the game, but sharing the dream. The chance for grown kids to bring each other's childhood kid dreams to life. 

Isn't that often the moral of sports - that the most magical dreams are the dreams we share, chase, and celebrate as one?

Yep, I was sound asleep. 

But sometimes it's worth being lured from our dreams to be reminded of the magic of dreams. And when you can share that reminder with your kid, well, there's no lack of magic in that. 

​Oliver Burkeman says, "I can't entirely depend on a single moment of the future." But I wonder, do some of us depend on the future more than we depend on anything else?

And additionally, I wonder, is there anything more undependable than the future?

How many people went to bed last night absolutely certain that today would be their day, only to not wake to the light of this new day?

I've come to believe the future is the most undependable thing we depend on. It’s the one we keep trying to secure, predict, or bargain with, as if our present moments are just down payments on a future that’s guaranteed to pay us back.

But it rarely works that way. The future doesn’t owe us anything. It isn’t even a real thing yet; it’s just imagination disguised as calendar dates.

What’s strange is how often we hand our peace over to that imaginary future. We say, “When this season passes… when I finally get that job… when my kids are older… when I’m healed…” And in doing so, we keep postponing the life we’re actually living.

The irony, though, is that the only place we can actually shape the future is in the present. The future is built out of moments like this one, this day we keep underestimating because it doesn't feel as magical as some magical day we dream of down the road.

Oh, if we only knew the magic of having this day...

Maybe there's a more dependable question we need to bring to this day: "What magic can I contribute to this day that doesn't depend on anything from the future?"

Is it my faith?

My kindness?

My compassion?

My undistracted presence?

What can I bring to this day that reflects who I am and not some rehearsal of who I dream of being tomorrow?

Tomorrow.

I guess it can offer hope, but I'm also sure it keeps far too many of us from contribution hope to the world today.