Watching Him Run

It was such an innocent observation.

I was sitting in the pew waiting for Mass to begin when I looked left and watched my friend — pastor of his parishes — run across the church. The unusualness of seeing a priest run in church took me by surprise. Priests, at least in my imagination, are supposed to move calmly and deliberately, not like someone trying to catch a flight at the airport.

At the time, I didn’t realize what I was actually seeing. But I remember the moment clearly. In an instant, I saw a visual example of what had quietly been happening in his life for a long time. Looking back now, I have a feeling the Holy Spirit had something to do with helping me understand what I should have realized long before then.

There are a lot of people who run like this every day.  Some run from Job 1 to Job 2 to Job 3 just to keep food on the table.

Some are widowed mothers, suddenly trying to figure out how to survive and raise children they never expected to raise alone. What began as ordinary life unexpectedly becomes a marathon.

Some are teachers who spend the entire day caring for other people’s children, only to return home and care for their own before staying up late grading papers for the next morning.

And then there is the pastor of a family of Catholic parishes, where each day becomes a blur of Masses, meetings, confessions, hospital visits, wedding rehearsals, phone calls, and late-night parish council meetings. Somewhere in there he hopefully finds ten minutes to eat — assuming he remembers to. His one “day off” somehow becomes laundry, grocery shopping, writing a homily, catching up on correspondence, and maybe, if he is lucky, a little sleep.

But always running.

When I saw my friend run, it all came together for me.

I thought I understood the responsibilities and burdens he carried. But until I saw him physically running through church, the bell had never fully rung for me. Instead, all along, I had quietly convinced myself that I was the one suffering from the loss of time with a friend.

That realization humbled me.  I thought I knew him as well as I could know anyone. Yet he had been running all along, quietly carrying responsibilities I understood intellectually but had not fully grasped emotionally.

And then I started noticing people like him everywhere.  They are not complainers. They are caregivers. They are the people who keep showing up even when they are exhausted. They are your mother, your brother, your teacher, your priest, your neighbor. Maybe they are you.

They come to work tired but determined not to show it. They carry their burdens quietly. Most of us never fully see them because they work very hard to make life look manageable.

Some people carry their world quietly.

As much as I wanted to help my friend, I slowly realized the best thing I could give him was space. Not distance. Not abandonment. Just space. Space to carry what he needed to carry without feeling guilty for not being everything to everyone all at once — including me.

That was difficult for me to accept.

Like many people who quietly carry enormous responsibility, he does not want to be rescued. He does not want pity. He simply keeps running.

And perhaps that is why prayer matters so much.

Sometimes prayer is the only thing left to offer when fixing, rescuing, or helping is no longer possible. Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is respect the boundaries people place around themselves, the limits of what they are willing to receive from others, and the dignity with which they choose to carry their burdens.

Many reserved or introverted people communicate through steadiness, consistency, and quiet reliability. Just showing up is their form of emotional language.

In some cases, simply being their friend is enough.

Watching him run changed how I see people.