I recently finished reading the runner Dean Karnazes's autobiography.  For those of you who are not familiar with Karnazes, he has achieved significant fame with his running prowess.  Karnazes is not ordinary runner; he is an ultramarathoner.  This means that for him a marathon is child's play, the mere beginning of what often turns out to be runs of 100 miles, 200 miles, or more.  He has completed the grueling Western States 100 mile run a number of times; once ran 229 miles non-stop; completed the arduous 135 mile Death Valley run; ran a marathon in Antarctica; once ran a marathon a day for fifty days, one in each state of the Union; and on and on.  The guy is amazing.
     What struck me while reading the book is Karnazes's oft repeated admission that he runs to find his meaning.  If he couldn't run, one might think that he would be a very unhappy and unfilled person.  His comments reminded me of some made many decades ago by Dougal Haston, a Scottish mountaineer who perished in an avalanche in the Swiss Alps in 1977.  In his journals, Haston remarked that, "I still feel the urge to fight with the forces of unknown walls.  It has almost become a necessary part of life for me,” to always be "looking for the next challenge, the next triumph, the next conquest, to feel happiness again, even if only for a moment," thinking, “history may never have been, shall we always remain suspended in the present,” and that all that remains is “to embrace the obstacle and the unknown,” to fight for "meaning, to encounter and fight through fear and dread, to conquer all."
     Though all I know of Karnazes's heart is what he has revealed in his book, and while I definitely respect and admire his running ability, I hope that he will, unlike Haston who, from all accounts, died, in his thirties, as frustrated with life's angst as he was when he began climbing as a teenager, find a life meaning that eclipses the evanescent character of athletic accomplishment, a power of living that exceeds the hope we all tend to, consciously or not, set in the transience of existence.
     We owe it to God, of course, to make optimal use of our gifts and talents.  We also owe it to God to recognize that what we've been given or what we accomplish with what we've been given is not all that life is.  Life is what we make it, yes, but life is ultimately bigger than we will ever be.  We are but a moment.