The Power of Witness

“Preach the Gospel always,” St. Francis of Assisi is said to have remarked. “If necessary, use words.” For someone who is all too prone to the temptation to verbosity, this quote serves as a powerful reminder. Although there are times for explicit evangelizing and apologetics, more often than not, the best way to share the love of Christ is simply to live it out.

Just consider these three examples which, by the grace of God, I’ve been able to come across:

The Family that Runs Together …

See the blog Raising Angels, most notably here, here, and here to read the race reports of the Parris family in Augusta, Georgia, whose six members all recently ran in a local “Glory Run” of various distances. Each child brought his or her own challenges to the race, as well as his own triumph, especially two-year-old Max.

I don’t know the Parris family, but I feel a certain kinship with them: Mary Kate and I have been married for 10 years, just like Amy and her husband. We also have four children — one girl (the eldest) and three sons — and we also have a little boy named for St. Maximilian Kolbe.

Our family doesn’t run in races together, but after reading about the Parrises’ experience, I’m inclined to give it a try. What a powerful witness it must have been to see this loving crew all running that day, and the image of the crowd cheering for little Max as he crossed the finish line is an awesome one, indeed.


Making a Habit Out of Running


I love stories about running nuns, and I’ve just encountered another: Sr. Mary Elizabeth Lloyd, who is supporting ultramarathoner Lisa Smith-Batchen in her effort to run 50 miles in all 50 states to raise money for AIDS orphans in Africa. (Their effort calls to mind the mission of Dana Casanave, who is running 52 marathons in 52 weeks for the same purpose.)

Sr. Mary Elizabeth has been all over the media lately (see: CNN, ABC, ESPN, Reuters), and what’s most telling is that in every episode, the reporter makes big deal out of her attire. The networks love to show images of this nun running in her special, technical habit. I have to wonder, if she were just wearing plain running clothes like everyone else, would her story attract so much attention? I doubt it. Good images make for good news. And by wearing her habit — uncomfortable though it must be — Sr. Mary Elizabeth is carrying the message of her mission, and the Gospel of the Lord, all the farther. (h/t Aggie Catholics)


Crossing the Goal
And that leads me to my last story, which comes by way of the Ten Reasons blog. There, Richard Leonardi tells the story of standing in the vestibule with a young child at Sunday Mass (an experience with which I am quite familiar!) during Cincinnati’s Flying Pigs Marathon, and seeing one runner cross herself as she passed his church. “Little acts of reverence are rare these days,” he writes; “we should do our part to re-popularize them.”

Amen. Crossing oneself before a church is, first and foremost, a way to honor the Real Presence of Christ in the tabernacle, but it’s also a small way of alerting others to that presence. Our acts of witness need not be family-wide, like the Parisses’, or spectacular, like Sr. Mary Elizabeth’s, but even something small, like making the Sign of the Cross, can — in ways we may never know — pay a role in bringing someone closer to Christ.