I had an epiphany around midnight that in the interest of time the next afternoon that I could get up and run outside before I went to work. This would only take an extra 30 minutes max since I didn't have to travel to the gym. When I got to the end of my driveway the next morning and the light from my porch faded, I had my second epiphany: back in the sticks where there are no street lights, its durn dark outside at 5:25 am...and cold...so with my iPod jammin' in the earbuds, I began to run and quickly decided to take one earbud out so that I could hear any rabid creatures that would lunge from the woods, since my visual perception was not only masked in the night but also blurry from tears that the cold air was causing. At one point I spooked some deer in the brush but before I realized the noise was deer running from me, my adrenaline surged and I was inclined to yell into the woods...may seem odd to you but since I can remember any time I've ever been scared at an unknown I've figured yelling might demonstrate that I'm nothing to mess with. Nearing mile 3 I had a third epiphany as I was trying to come up with a pithy Tweet to describe this experience: The darkness had served a purpose in my run. It was enveloping. I can't describe it, but the darkness definitely served a purpose. Then it occurred to me that this realization shed some light on a hard passage of scripture that I've been reading over, namely Romans 9 about God's sovereignty. This is probably the single most difficult passage in all of scripture to swallow...I won't get into it, because major schools of theology have deliberated on it for hundreds of years...you can read it for yourself...but I just think it's cool how a cold, dark run is a display of God's mercy in my relationship to Him.
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