The more vulnerable you are, the less fragile you will become.
The alarm went off at 4:15 AM. Outside, I could hear what sounded like torrential rain, with sporadic gusts of wind buffeting the trees near our house. It was 38 degrees. Having looked at the forecast the night before, I knew what I was in for. But as I stumbled out of bed and the reality set in of the 17-mile run that lie ahead, thoughts of just delaying it to a drier day were percolating through my mind.
But as marathon training is as much about encountering and embracing grueling conditions as it is about the miles accumulated, I knew in my heart that my hesitations were going to give way to the plan. Even more, my son had his own journey that day, trying to qualify for the state finals in wrestling, a sport that no doubt demands an attitude of grit and humility. I wanted to be a moving prayer for him.
As I walked outside in the darkness and started to run, the streets seemed to be drowning in darkness. Less than a mile from my house, I received an undesired baptism as a passing motorist flushed a puddle all over me. Any hope of staying dry, which was a pipe dream for a run in which steady rainfall was the biggest reprieve I would get, was long since dashed with the predawn ice bath.
I knew the real challenge of the morning wasn’t the miles, precipitation or the temperature, but rather the combination of all—in darkness. For anyone has ever taken up running seriously, it’s common knowledge that a dry, 20-degree run is far more pleasant than a sub-40 degree wet one. Beyond our obvious aversion to a long, cold shower in winter, the reason is simple–—repeated frigid rain threatens to make us too cold to run, and just too cold.
For shorter runs, it’s not a big deal, especially because a faster pace produces more heat, but for longer runs, the challenge of creating enough heat to stave off the early signs of hypothermia while still maintaining a reasonable pace for that distance isn’t so easy. Fortunately, my route was taking me into the city, where I was acutely aware of various stops that I could make if I simply couldn’t stay ahead of the temperature gradient.
Settling into my run, I was acutely aware of just how vulnerable I was. I knew that I was depending on countless systems of God’s design to keep me moving and warm (enough), none of which I had any hand in creating. Systems of circulation, respiration, thermoregulation, homeostasis, musculature, nerves/neurons, and so much more. At points, I was depending on hills to create more challenge (and thus more heat), and prayers, meditations, and moments of raw inspiration to keep my will strong enough to not let the penetrating, frigid rain dampen my spirit. I was relying on my training up to this point, not just for the physical endurance that I had acquired, but also on countless previous situations that psychologically reinforced me that this run was possible just as other difficult training experiences had been, too.
Running through the flooded, empty streets, I could literally see myself at different times, different places, where the windchill was twenty below or the snow was eight inches deep, still moving and still praising the One who had made it possible for me to be joyful in moments of trial. The more vulnerable I was, the less fragile I had become.
A few days before Christmas in 1943, Leon Crane joined his fellow airmen on a routine flight to test a B-24 in arctic conditions. Taking off from Alaska’s Ladd Field, all seemed fine until inexplicably the plane incurred multiple mechanical failures, and plunged out of the sky into the Yukon landscape. As a city kid from Philadelphia with no backcountry training, Leon suddenly found himself parachuting alone into the wilderness, with no knowledge of where he was and what was around him. With just a flight suit and a parachute for cover (and gloves accidentally left in the plane), fortunate to have his Boy Scout knife and a book of matches he grabbed heading out the door, he suddenly found himself face-to-face with seemingly insurmountable odds. For 81 days, with the temperatures repeatedly plunging well below zero, he wouldn’t see another human being.
Once Leon settled into the brutality of his situation, he was confronted with more than just having no food, shelter, map, and the arctic conditions. Throughout the book that details this extraordinary story, it’s clear that Leon was confronted with the reality that in his vulnerability, he was anything but fragile; that is, unless he succumbed to the understandable pull to let the conditions expose his frailties. Instead, emboldened by thoughts of his mourning loved ones back home, and his comrades fighting in a war that seemed a million miles away, he turned an initial walk of death into an extraordinary journey of resolve.
We live in a time that celebrates incomparable stories of success and repeated stories of fragility. While it’s understandable that we are enamored by both, it turns out that many of them are fraught with lies. Liz Murray, known for her homeless to Harvard story, once bemoaned that when others attempted to describe her dramatic transformation, they made it sound like she had pulled herself up by “her own bootstraps.” The real tale was that she had been helped by many people, including a few key individuals, which if not for them she would have likely still been on the streets.
It’s not just that we are in need of each other. If Leon learned anything, it’s that in order to be strong, we must confront our vulnerabilities on all fronts and consider the blessings reflected in return. Truth be told, we’re all a microsecond or a micrometer away from being in really dire straits, understanding that what we can’t perceive is what keeps us most vulnerable. It’s easy to feel immobilized by this and to want to huddle in our warm, cozy chambers, hoping to falsely stave away all risk as it grows in ways that we’d rather not acknowledge. Yet it’s in truly embracing our vulnerabilities that we come to discover unfathomable strength that is ordained within each of us, and when we unite together.
Just the same is the fallacy of our frailty, perpetually broadcasted and bemoaned, that seeks to falsify the people and communities that we are called to be. To acknowledge our victimhood is human; to embrace our victimhood is death. And not just death of a physical or psychological sort, but even more damning is of the spiritual sort. The moment we consciously choose, and repeatedly choose, a course of victimhood is the moment that we relegate the keys to the kingdom over to someone or something that surely will never understand the being that lies within us. Just as Leon learned to find warmth in an unfathomably cold place, even with no prior experience, so we, too, can find possibilities for joy, peace, and meaning in what seem like doldrums of darkness and despair.
But only if we embrace our vulnerabilities, not as a pathway to fragility, but rather as a corridor to confidence—confidence in who we are, and who we are created to be. Among numerous means that assist us in this journey, one stands out like a beacon of light in the darkest of places. As Dr. Frankl once said, it’s our attitude towards suffering, imposed or unavoidable. It’s not that we have to, or even should, sadistically undertake and/or embrace suffering for its own sake. Rather, it’s the value that we place on suffering that matters the most. Simply put, we all have a daily decision to make. Do we see the suffering that we encounter as having worth, and as a means to grow stronger, wiser, more capable and more caring, or do we see suffering as a device that weakens our resolve, our capacity, and our ties to others and a purpose that is much greater than ourselves?
Deep within the mysterious confines of our minds and bodies lies an undeniable fact, illuminated by countless placebo studies. If we retain hope imbued by our vulnerability, then movement of all kinds remains possible, even when the temperatures are forty below. If we lose hope imparted by our fragility, then we’ve reached an impasse, and at best we will just slowly slide backward as the world passes by. More powerful than we can ever imagine lies this Individual and collective choice. More powerful is the will ordained with in us to alter the course we’re on. Most powerful is the moment we realize that with purpose and with love, we are alive!
Vulnerable, not fragile; broken, not shattered; determined, not done.
