There is a crack in my parents' front door. The door is not in disrepair, and to most observers, there is no visible sign that the door's integrity is compromised. At night the severity and even the presence of the crack are impossible to determine. But when the sun shines, the light that presses through the crack bears an undeniable testimony.

I recently spent a few days at my parents' home. It was not a visit of pleasure but one of heartache. Close family friends had lost a son and a grandson, and I returned home to be with this family. My heart was broken. The heaviness of grief was felt with every breath. The fatigue of sadness rested on my shoulders like cumbersome over-stuffed luggage. Everything within me wanted to do something to make it better, assuage my friends' pain, and heal the brokenness. But there was nothing that could be done. All I could do was remember the wisdom of Solomon that there is an appointed time for everything, and this was a time to weep and mourn. And so, we did.

Things are sad at my house this week. Our 11-year-old golden retriever died this past Monday. Copper came to our family as a gift from friends and proved to be a gift of God’s grace. When he joined our family, our oldest was eight years old, and our youngest was two years old. With such a young family, Dana had a lot on her plate. She was home with the children, and a new dog would only add to her responsibilities. Because of this, I felt that the decision of when (or if) we would get a new dog should be hers. It had been a while since our first dog had died, and other than saying she wanted our next dog to be a small breed we had talked very little about getting anything new.

Then one day, Dana called me at church to tell me that the Hancock’s had offered to give us a dog. Mike and Cathy Hancock were members of our church and good friends. I had been to their home many times and knew that the dogs that they bred were beautiful golden retrievers and that the father was large for the breed. A little surprised that Dana was considering having another large breed dog, I asked if she was sure she wanted a golden retriever. She countered that she thought a new dog would be good for the children. I was happily surprised both by the gift of the Hancocks and the receptiveness of Dana.

We pass them by every day on the roads that we travel without much thought or recognition. Little green signs, with white numbers marking the distance in miles from a starting point, blend into the scenery beside the road. These mile marker signs are part of a very long history that stretches back to the first constructed roads. There still stands today beside the roads that the Romans constructed stones engraved numbers indicating the distance from Rome. These stones are called milestones. With this long history, the word "milestone" has found a place in our lexicon not only referring to an object that indicates the distance from a specific point but also to a moment in time that has significance or distinction.

This past weekend I traveled to Columbus, GA, to celebrate a milestone with my dad, who is also named Ben Smith. On Friday, September 1, 1978, my dad started running. From the start, he recorded his running miles and eventually would add them to an Excel file to keep track of his total distance. I was a little boy when he started running, so I do not remember a time when he was not a runner. I do remember that over the years, I would hear him mention different goals that he was striving for. In the early 1980’s he was training to qualify and then run the Boston Marathon. Years later, as his total distance of running approached the distance in miles equal to the distance around the Earth at the equator (24,901 miles), he regularly made announcements as to how close he was getting. When he reached this milestone, he was running with some of his longtime running partners. They stopped and used a disposable camera to capture the moment then continued their run.

When I was a child, my mother would often take us to visit my great-aunt, who lived in a nursing home in Columbus, GA. When we would enter the building, we would be greeted by a resident who spent his days sitting by the front door. He seemed to always be there. The front of the building had large floor-to-ceiling windows. He likely enjoyed the spot by the front door because it afforded him a good view of the world outside. We would have likely walked past this man with little more than a polite greeting if it were not for his aggressive initiation of a conversation. When the man saw someone enter through the front door and begin to walk toward him, he would enthusiastically and with great confidence shout out, “I bet I know where you got your shoes!”

My first solo hospital visit as a pastor did not go as planned. In fact, it went so badly that I hoped that the lady, whom I was visiting, did not remember the visit. I never even told her that I came to see her that day.

I was serving as an associate pastor of a little church while attending seminary. I was primarily responsible for student ministry. But on this occasion, our pastor was out of town, and I was covering the hospital visits. This was to be my first official pastoral visit. Sure, I had visited the hospital before, as well as gone with other pastors on such visits, but this was to be my first solo visit. I had no worries, why should I? Every other such visit I had been a part of seemed easy and tame. How could I have imagined that on that day, my experience would leave an indelible mark on my memory but one I would never reveal to the person I was visiting.

A few years ago, I decided to start running. Several reasons motivated me to start running but chief among them was I recognized that my health was not moving in a positive direction. It was not that I had a health crisis or had received some troubling diagnosis but rather I recognized that the combination of not eating well and a lifestyle that was mostly sedentary was conspiring to rob me of energy and endurance.

When I began running, I did two things. First, I dramatically changed my diet. I cut out things that were high in sugar and salt and I cut my portion sizes. The second thing was I began to run every morning. Well, more accurately I attempted to run every morning.

There is a moment in the evening just before dark when everything changes. It can catch you off guard if you are not careful. I am thinking of the moment when dusk turns to night. Walking through the woods in the afternoon sun is a beautiful experience. And, even after the sun sets over the horizon, there are those last rays of the sun that paint the air with beautiful tones. If you walk deep in the woods, enjoying the last moments of the day, you will find (before you are aware) something happens to change everything.