(An original Easter daily devotional written especially for Hokie fans.)
Read John 20:1-10.
“Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first” (vv. 3-4).
Though he realized he’d “never run more than 100 yards in [his] life,” Virginia Tech quarterback Tom Stafford once determined to run from campus to Roanoke to win $40.
As a junior in 1965, Stafford was behind starter Bobby Owens, and he saw very little action. As a result, he spent a lot of time on the bench in the company of his teammates. One afternoon during a game, conversation got around to running long distances, and eventually someone came up with the idea of running all the way to Roanoke. One of the players put a pool together, securing a dollar per man, and the pot climbed up to $40.
That was a lot of money to Stafford, so he decided to make the run. One of his teammates and he set out, running “through Dixie Caverns and up and down the hills and everything” on that day before Interstate 81. His running partner quit after about an hour, but Stafford jogged on.
Several of his friends, including offensive lineman Milt Miller, escorted Stafford on the highway with a car for a while. Finally, though, they went on ahead to Salem, “watched a movie at the theater . . ., had dinner at some hamburger joint, came back, and found me still on the road.” At that point, his teammates stretched a piece of twine across the highway close to Salem and used it as a finish line.
Even after he spent a couple of hours in the shower trying to recover from his five-hour run, Stafford could barely move the next day at practice. When head coach Jerry Claiborne asked him what was wrong, Stafford replied, “Milt Miller stepped on me.” Stafford waited until his senior season to tell Claiborne the truth, and the coach “got a kick out of it.”
Before the coronavirus put our lives on hold, we hit the ground running. Every morning that’s what we did as we left the house and re-entered the rat race. We run errands; we run through a presentation; we give someone a run for his money; we always want to be in the running and never run-of-the-mill.
In our lives, we’re always running toward something, such as our goals, or away from something, such as our pasts. Many of us spend much of our lives foolhardily attempting to run away from God, the purposes he has for us, and the blessings he is waiting to give us.
No matter how hard or how far we run, though, we can never outrun ourselves or God. God keeps pace with each of us calling us in the short run to take care of the long run by falling to our knees and running for our lives — to Jesus — just as Peter and the other disciple ran that first Easter morning.
On our knees, we run all the way to glory.
I still have that finish line to this day.
— Tom Stafford on a souvenir of his run to Salem
We can run to eternity by going to our knees.
