My legs are darker than my feet because

A) Doing yard work in the 100+ degree heat gave my legs a great tan,
B) The dry, dusty yard caked my legs with that much dirt, or
C) I’m a freak and now you know why I wear long pants in public.

If you answered C, I don’t like you any more. If you answered B, we have a winner! Dry yard plus rotating blades of lawnmower equals clouds of dust following me everywhere I went. This was the result.

Yuck!

9 weeks ago, I started a training program that has been used by thousands of people to get them started in running. The name is “Couch to 5K” and it can be found over at the Cool Running website. It claims to take you from never running to running a 5k in 9 weeks. I was skeptical for one main reason:

I HATE RUNNING!!!!

But, there’s other things I hate more than running, like not being around for my children’s graduations, weddings, and children. I also hate the idea of becoming a fat preacher because, well, honestly, there’s already an over-abundance of those. So, as much as I hate running, I figured it beat the alternative of being dead even while I’m alive, and so I gave the program a shot. Here are the results:

Week 1, Day 1:
I ran/walked 1.2 miles in 20 minutes. Yes, that is a blistering 16:40/mile pace. I weighed 207 pounds. I’d like to think that most of that was muscle, but people know me and so it makes it hard to live with that delusion. I do have a fairly large frame, so I can carry that much weight without looking overweight. But the point is that I don’t need to carry 207 around.

Week 9, Day 3:
Today, I finished my last run of the program. I ran without walking 3.1 miles in 30:26. I won’t know how much I weigh until tomorrow morning when I step on the scales, but last Sunday I was down to 201. I’m hoping to be somewhere at or under 200 (UPDATE: I weighed in at 200 pounds, so I lost a little under a pound a week on the program).

I feel great. I didn’t die. I can play more with my kids now without breathing heavy while trying to convince them that I’m fine when they know I’m not. That alone makes it worth the trouble. I’m not sure if I can say that I still hate running. I think we’re going to date a bit and see if this relationship works out. We’ll see.

First of all, that video is pretty graphic. I don’t think I’d let your kids see it. But I included it more for the running commentary than for what’s actually on it. If you want to hear more reaction, you can check out the commentary from the Fox News channel, too. It’s got some stuff at the end about a French building climber that’s unrelated, but cool to watch.

Recently in Hartford, Connecticut, a 78 year-old man was the victim of a hit and run. Police there just released the videos to the public in order to try and catch the person who hit him, and now it’s all over the news. What gets me about this story, outside of the fact that a man got hit and no one helped, is how outraged the reaction is to it. Read some of the excerpts from the story on the Fox News website:

“At the end of the day we’ve got to look at ourselves and understand that our moral values have now changed.” Police Chief Daryl Roberts said. “We have no regard for each other.”

Witness Bryant Hayre said he didn’t feel comfortable helping Torres, who he said was bleeding and conscious.

“Whoever did this should be sent away for a long time,” Hayre told The Hartford Courant. “It was as if he was a dog left in the street to die.”

That second one really struck me. Did you catch it? The witness admitted that he didn’t feel comfortable helping and then talked about how the person driving left the man like a dog to die in the street. But, he didn’t want to help! So who left the 78 year-old man like a dog in the street? That’s right. The man who admitted he didn’t want to help.

Check out this quote from the Hartford, Conn. police chief:

“There was a time they would have helped that man across the street. Now they mug and assault him,” Roberts said. “That’s not a police problem. We no longer have a moral compass. Anything goes.”

So, here’s the part that leaves me shaking my head. People are outraged and shocked that the end result of a society that doesn’t want absolute values is a society that will watch instead of help. Seems like we could’ve seen that one coming, right? I’m not sure why we should be surprised at all about what we’re seeing on the video footage, because we’ve not been taught to value anyone or anything other than what affects ourselves.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m outraged, too. I’m outraged at how quickly we point out the coldness in others that is eerily similar to the temperature inside ourselves. This is surely why we need Jesus to be near our culture and our society. Not just so we help people who are hurting, but so that we begin to look more honestly at ourselves.