Before the Wilderness

Hellbender 100 — Part 1 of 3

Hellbender 100. Brutal.

Over 100 miles through the mountains of Western North Carolina. Roughly 20,000 feet of climbing. Darkness. Sleep deprivation. Hallucination-level fatigue. Long stretches of isolation where pain slowly strips away comfort, ego, and whatever version of yourself you were still trying to protect.

You do not accidentally finish a race like this.
You willingly walk into the wilderness.

And honestly, when I first signed up for Hellbender, my motives were not nearly as clean as I would like to pretend they were. I was at my keyboard the moment registration opened. The race sold out within days. I beat my chest about it. Pretended to be nonchalant. But I was proud of it. Proud that I got in. Proud that I was going to attempt it. Proud that I was willing to do something most people wouldn’t.

Part of me wanted to see what I was capable of.
Part of me wanted others to see it too.
I didn’t want many people to know. But many found out.

I wanted my own suffer fest. My own proving ground. I wanted to willingly step into something hard and come out the other side different somehow. Stronger maybe. More capable. More disciplined. More tested.

Endurance culture can dress those desires up in noble language pretty quickly. We call it grit. Resilience. Discipline. Mental toughness. For most of my adult life, I learned to value carrying the load, enduring discomfort, and continuing forward when everything in me wanted to quit. Men’s ministries call it perseverance. I believe in all those things. I’ve built much of my life around them. But if I’m honest, those same virtues can become excellent hiding places for pride.

Sometimes what looks like discipline is really self-reliance. Sometimes what looks like toughness is just another attempt to prove something. Sometimes what looks like strength is really an unwillingness to admit weakness.

I knew that temptation was alive in me too. And somewhere during preparation, God started tugging hard on my heart about it. It was not all at once. Not through some dramatic emotional moment. Just this growing conviction that I needed to examine why I was really doing this and what exactly I was hoping to gain from it.

What was I actually chasing? Why did I need something this difficult? Had accomplishment quietly attached itself to my identity again? Was I trying to find meaning in suffering itself rather than in God?

I started asking the Lord to help me turn the race into something that could actually glorify Him instead of just feeding myself.

And that is where things began to change.
It was not overnight. It was not perfect.
But enough that I could feel Him redirecting my attention.

Hellbender would eventually expose these things, but it wasn't where they started.

Thank You, Father.

Creation in Genesis 1 and 2 feels like the ultimate expression of creative power and purpose. It makes sense that my soul would look there for an anchor. I didn’t set out to build anything around it. I just found myself returning there over and over again. Something about those opening chapters felt steady. Month after month, as race day slowly approached, I kept finding myself lingering in different parts of the creation account. I wasn’t looking for training advice or race strategy. Just looking for the Lord.

Anyone can run Hellbender without God.
Anyone can complete it. The race itself is not the miracle. But if all creation points back to its Creator, then the mountains, the darkness, the fatigue, the beauty, the fear, and the endurance all become opportunities to see what was there all along. I didn’t want to miss that. The wilderness did not bring me closer to God as much as it removed enough distractions for me to recognize how close He had been the entire time.

As I read and meditated on the Word, sometimes my attention would settle on those opening moments before anything had really taken shape. Before growth. Before movement. Before life itself begins to fill the pages.
God speaks light into darkness. That challenged me more than I expected.
Before worrying about mileage, vert, pacing, gear, nutrition, or cutoff times, I needed to honestly examine my motives. I needed God to illuminate things I could not fully see on my own. To speak light into darkness.
Pride has a funny way of hiding in plain sight.

Other times I found myself drawn to the way God established order before fruitfulness. Boundaries before abundance. Rhythm before growth.
That was harder for me than I wanted to admit.
I like control. I like pushing. I like proving.
Training kept reminding me that recovery matters. Sleep matters. Restraint matters. Limits are not obstacles to overcome. They are gifts from God.
For a man who has spent much of his life believing he can simply work harder, that lesson does not come naturally.

Then there were the long months of repetition. The quiet miles. The hidden work.
Genesis describes the earth bringing forth life according to God’s word. Slowly. Consistently. Without fanfare. That felt familiar. Fitness develops that way. Spiritual maturity often does too.

During those months, I found myself thinking a lot about abiding. And not as an idea, but as a reality.
For most of my life, I learned to value self-sufficiency. Yet the Lord kept reminding me that abiding requires dependence. Not casual dependence. Sincere dependence. I used to think abiding mostly meant comfort. Peace. Nearness.

But I started wondering if abiding had more to do with surrender than comfort.
Because if abiding means taking refuge in Christ, shouldn’t we first recognize that we actually need refuge?
Weakness has a way of exposing that.

As race day drew closer, I found myself thinking less about performance and more about timing. Less about outcomes and more about trust. The temptation was always there to compare, to force confidence, to manufacture certainty about how the race would unfold. But God governs pace better than I do. Not every question needed an answer. Not every uncertainty needed to be resolved. Sometimes obedience is simply continuing forward with open hands.

As mileage increased and fatigue accumulated, another truth slowly emerged. The illusion of self-sufficiency started cracking. I realized how quickly confidence can drift from gratitude into self-reliance. Strength, I was learning, is ultimately received, not possessed. And that lesson became increasingly important as race day approached.

Toward the end of training, I found myself reflecting on something that would become even more obvious during Hellbender itself. Suffering does not create character nearly as much as it reveals it. Fatigue exposes what is already there.

Pride. Fear. Anxiety. Trust. Gratitude. Humility.

The race was becoming less about accomplishment and more about what would surface when things got hard. Less about proving myself. More about seeing myself honestly.

And then race week arrived.

By that point, there was very little left to prove physically. The deeper challenge was surrendering outcome, expectation, fear, and control. I wanted to hold the race with open hands before the Lord. And it was not because I had suddenly become humble. Definitely not because I had purified all my motives.

But because God had spent months exposing just how mixed those motives really were. By His grace and mercy.

Looking back now, I can see that the Lord was preparing me for something far deeper than a hundred-mile race. Long before I stepped onto the trail, He was already confronting the very thing I thought Hellbender would strengthen.

My self-sufficiency.

Because deep down, I think I already knew something the race would eventually expose in full:

I am not sufficient.

Maybe that’s where abiding begins.

Soli Deo Gloria