LOOKIN’ GOOD [Good Friday, 4-3-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Good Friday Memes of An Old Runner—LOOKIN’ GOOD [Good Friday, 4-3-26]

 

When I turned forty, I realized that I was no longer young enough to get by on good looks and personality, and my lithe and limber body. My body had suddenly, it seemed, become stiff and uncooperative.

The running boom was just beginning then. Everyone who was not running was jogging. Gurus like Dr. George Sheehan and Jim Fixx wrote books. Many running magazines were starting up, as were running clubs. Every town festival included foot races of uncertain length, since apparently in running races you had to use unknown quantities, like kilometers.

So I decided to become a runner. I laced up my old basketball shoes and went to the park to run. Very quickly, my heels and soles and tendons and knees were aching.

I went to Jim Matta, a church member and the athletic director at the high school—and father of famous basketball coach, Thad Matta, who was only ten then—and told him my woes. Long before Spike Lee and Michael Jordan did that commercial, Jim said, “It’s gotta be the shoes.”

Now, everybody wears running shoes all the time, even men in suits and ties, even women in church dresses and evening gowns. Our pastor has a wonderful array of pulpit robes and stoles, and “underneath are the everlasting running shoes.” But running shoes were just a gleam in Phil Knight’s eye then.

I went to the shoe store on Main Street. In those days, folks thought shoes were leather things you put on your feet to walk to work and school and church. Running shoes were strange new things. People didn’t even know how to pronounce Nike. But the store had a pair of running shoes in my size. I had never heard of the Patrick Shoe Company, but I bought them because they were cream and crimson, my colors.

Within five minutes of running in those magic shoes, all my pains were gone. What a difference a heel makes.

So I became a runner. I bought a red track suit to go with my shoes and I ran all over town. My teen daughters were mortified. Their friends called me “The Red Phantom,” because I was so fast that I was just a blur. Or maybe it was only because of the red suit.

But I wasn’t just a runner. I was a racer. There were 10 K races in one town or another every weekend. Many were on Sunday morning, when I was busy otherwise, but enough were on Saturday that I became a regular on the racing scene. I even joined The Kickapoo Running Club. I won little statues for coming in 2^nd in my age group. [Usually there were three runners in my age group] I still display those statues on my book case, on the shelf where I used to keep theology books.

I don’t know exactly why, but the proper protocol in those days, whenever you met another runner, you shouted out to each other, “Lookin’ good.”

The races were often on an out-and-back course. That meant that we pack runners would still be going out and meet the front runners after they had made the turn and started back. They were running hard, all-out. they were sweating and puffing and beginning to lose smoothness. We called out to them, “Lookin’ good,” which was the exact opposite of how they really looked. But they looked the way they were supposed to, for people who were running all out, trying “…to run with perseverance the race marked out for us.” [Hebrews 12:1-2]

One of my favorite anecdotes/illustrations/points comes from Lin Yutang’s A Leaf in the Storm, enough so that I have used it many times. It is revolutionary times in China. The storm in the title is political upheaval and war. The leaf is a young woman named Malin who has always taken pride in her beauty, who has always lived in luxury and pleasure, but is reduced to the status of a refugee, fleeing the war on foot along muddy roads. Her fine clothes and shoes change from being status symbols to a hindrance.

Along the way, she sees peasant women who are ignoring the war. They’ve seen it all before. They are working in their rice fields, as they always have, for once the storm has passed, people will need the rice again. They are stocky and lumpy and have no comeliness of face or figure. They are standing almost up to their knees in mud. Their legs are not shapely to look at. But Malin has an epiphany. The legs of those peasant women are beautiful, because they are doing what they are meant to do. They were lookin’ good.

Today, on Good Friday, seeing Jesus there on the cross, those who understand look at that broken body and whisper, “Lookin’ good. Lookin’ good.”

John Robert McFarland