The Hands That Could Not Hold Her Back

On April 19, 1967, twenty-year-old Kathrine Switzer pinned bib number 261 to her sweatshirt and lined up at the start of the Boston Marathon. She had registered using her initials — K.V. Switzer — because women were not officially permitted to enter. Just a few miles in, race manager Jock Semple spotted her, charged into the pack of runners, and grabbed her shoulder, shouting, "Get out of my race!" He clawed at her bib number, trying to physically drag her off the course.

Switzer stumbled but did not stop. Her boyfriend, Tom Miller, a former hammer thrower running beside her, threw a shoulder block that sent Semple sprawling. Shaken and frightened, Switzer made a decision: she would finish. Four hours and twenty minutes later, she crossed the finish line — the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon with an official race number.

The writer of Hebrews understood this kind of race. "Let us throw off everything that hinders," he urged, "and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us" (Hebrews 12:1). Every believer knows the feeling of hands reaching out to pull us from the course — discouragement, shame, the voices that insist we do not belong. But the call of the Almighty is not so easily revoked. When God has marked out a race for you, no hand can tear that number from your chest. The only question is whether you will keep running.