Dehydrated without God.

My first race 4THEM: 2018 Origin Of Trails 15km trail run

A little bit of background. At the time I had just turned 17, I had a weekly mileage of about 35km and the longest run that I had done before the race was 12km. I was back home after an outreach to Lesotho with my church. As things usually are after such rich spiritual experiences, I had renewed energy and a will to take steps in my walk alongside Christ after I had experienced what true joy and peace a life of true faith in Jesus brings. There were numerous occasions in my life where I had felt the same drive before, but the world always just sucked me back in, back to a life of comfort in security created by myself, back into the driving seat, causing that internal flame to dim. As Grace would have it, I had prayed a prayer that would change me in the coming years of my life. It was simple and have been prayed by many before me. It was this. ‘‘Lord, my Saviour and my King, turn me into a tool that you can use, a tool that you hold in Your hand. I am capable of nothing without You, my heart’s greatest desire is to be used by You in the way that You please.’’ I prayed it many times, and I still do.

Some time thereafter, Thys Visser came to speak at my church about Opendoors, about the persecuted church and a new initiative called 4THEM, where athletes can help meet the needs of persecuted Christians worldwide by doing something they love. When I heard stories about the persecuted church I felt the Holy Spirit inside me and I knew that this was an opportunity that God had sent me where I can serve Him with something that I am good at and love doing. This moment, becoming aware of the lives of Christians who are persecuted severely on a daily basis, changed my perspective on life and showed me that there is so much more to life than what I can think of at any moment. But that it can be narrowed down to one important fact, a life without faith in Jesus Christ is what one should be most afraid of…

It is a beautiful morning. I got out of bed with excitement for the day ahead, this was my first trail race ever and I was ready to show my strength and speed whilst I tackle the Stellenbosch mountains, or that was my plan at the time. As I was an infant to the sport of trail running, I had the confidence needed to race well but I was lacking that one important thing called experience. I had recently decided to cut all items from my diet that contains added or concentrated sugars, which to this day I still do. But my problem came in when the race organisers decided to supply Coke and only Coke at the waterpoints as a measure to be more waterwise, which to my opinion still does not make any sense. Anyhow, the race commenced, and I was running like never before. I was running for the persecuted church. Every pain and each ache were something that brought me closer to the persecuted church and Jesus, this thought gave me strength to push through. Whenever I felt like slowing down, I had an image in my head of the stories that Thys had told when he was at our church reminding me of the uncountable number of Christians suffering a great deal more than I was at that moment, all because they chose Christ above all else. I had gone through the aid station without taking any refreshment and soon enough, after about eleven kilometres, I began feeling the first symptoms of dehydration. My mind was a fog and I was tripping over my own feet and kicking every rock that stood more than two centimetres out of the ground, to this day I still have a dead toenail reminding me of that experience. With about one kilometre to go, the dizziness had caused me to, unknowingly, take a wrong turn and I ended up collapsing and passing out on a gravel road next to the cow pens of the University experimental farm. I woke up in an ambulance, asking the nurse and people who found me: “Did I win?“ When they told me that I did not even reach the finish line, I was determined to go and finish the race, but luckily there was a strong nurse and a fluid drip keeping me on the ambulance stretcher.

This story has a lot more details that I have thought about and considered a miracle, one of them being the people who came upon me and called the ambulance. They saw me just before the cow pen would have been opened to move the cows to a different pen that was down the road I was laying unconsciously in.

But God taught me far greater lessons from this experience than what I could’ve dreamed of or hoped for. I was determined to win this race for God and the persecuted church, instead there stood a DNF (did not finish) next to my name on the results list. Would it have been in God’s power to help me win, of course, but I learned that a victory does not prove God’s faithfulness, nor does a safe and easy pain-free life (or race). But that He is faithful in His promises, in the cross, in the greater picture He is always faithful even if your race does not go the way you would’ve wanted it to. Because in the end, if you live up to your end of the bargain and have true life changing faith in God, He will give you a prize that makes everything and anything here on Earth seem of no value. He promises us everlasting life in communion with Himself, something that is worth dying for as proven by countless of persecuted Christians.

But where does it leave us? This experience also taught me that you cannot run your race without nourishment. Without nourishment, we will not cross the finish line. And the only nourishment which can satisfy our needs is that of the love of God. We need to live in it, we need to give it and we need to be able to receive it. But you can only live in the love of God if you believe, have faith, that His love is endless and unimaginable and that whatever amount of His Grace you poor out onto His children because you love them, He will fill you with over and over and over and over and over and over and over again because He loves you. I hope and pray that you too will every day pray that you can be used by God as He pleases and that you will have the courage to walk that path He sets you on.

A picture of me leading the race at about 10km