The scripture that flooded to my mind as I watched this video for the first time was, Luke 11:13 – If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, HOW MUCH MORE, will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.

The impacting words being, HOW MUCH MORE.  I saw in Dick Hoyt, an earthly father’s amazing love for his son.  A love that compelled him beyond the ordinary into the extraordinary. He does it because it makes his son feel alive and it gives him joy.  I’ve even read that many have encouraged Dick to run a marathon or triathlon himself, because surely without pushing a stroller, or dragging a raft, or having another body on his bike he could finish really well.  Dick simply said, “I do it for him.”  Dick has sacrificed and worked his own body to unimaginable lengths to give his son and continue to give his son this amazing gift.

Though this is not the Hoyt’s intentional message, the message of the love of our Heavenly Father and the lengths He has gone to give us the Holy Spirit and every good gift speaks through their lives to my heart.  I can’t watch the video without realizing that I need to know my Heavenly Father who loves me so much He sacrificed his beloved Son, so that I could be reunited with Him, forgiven and free – free now to live in a relationship where nothing has to separate me from this Love ever again (rms8). 

This is what soaking prayer is all about.  We give our Father the opportunity to pour out His love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.  We welcome the Holy Spirit whose role it is to reveal the love of the Father to us, and pour that love into our hearts, so we know we are HIS children, and cry out “Abba”, (Daddy). (RM 8, Gal 4).  We realize we are so desperately malnourished of the Father’s love.  As we spend time with Him, saying things like, “Have your way.  Come Holy Spirit and fill us again.  We need MORE of you.”; His presence comes, His love is poured into our hearts, we are filled again and again with the Holy Spirit, we hear His voice, our hearts get healed, we move into a deeper relationship with Him, and we leave different than when we arrived.

Dare to find out HOW MUCH MORE the Father has for you – you’ll never be the same!!

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Dick and Rick Hoyt are a father-and-son team from Massachusetts who together compete just about continuously in marathon races. And if they’re not in a marathon they are in a triathlon — that daunting, almost superhuman, combination of 26.2 miles of running, 112 miles of bicycling, and 2.4 miles of swimming. Together they have climbed mountains, and once trekked 3,735 miles across America.

It’s a remarkable record of exertion — all the more so when you consider that Rick can't walk or talk.

For the past twenty five years or more Dick, who is 65, has pushed and pulled his son across the country and over hundreds of finish lines. When Dick runs, Rick is in a wheelchair that Dick is pushing. When Dick cycles, Rick is in the seat-pod from his wheelchair, attached to the front of the bike. When Dick swims, Rick is in a small but heavy, firmly stabilized boat being pulled by Dick.

At Rick’s birth in 1962 the umbilical cord coiled around his neck and cut off oxygen to his brain. Dick and his wife, Judy, were told that there would be no hope for their child’s development.

"It’s been a story of exclusion ever since he was born," Dick told me. "When he was eight months old the doctors told us we should just put him away — he’d be a vegetable all his life, that sort of thing. Well those doctors are not alive any more, but I would like them to be able to see Rick now."

The couple brought their son home determined to raise him as "normally" as possible. Within five years, Rick had two younger brothers, and the Hoyts were convinced Rick was just as intelligent as his siblings. Dick remembers the struggle to get the local school authorities to agree: "Because he couldn’t talk they thought he wouldn’t be able to understand, but that wasn’t true." The dedicated parents taught Rick the alphabet. "We always wanted Rick included in everything," Dick said. "That’s why we wanted to get him into public school."

A group of Tufts University engineers came to the rescue, once they had seen some clear, empirical evidence of Rick’s comprehension skills. "They told him a joke," said Dick. "Rick just cracked up. They knew then that he could communicate!" The engineers went on to build — using $5,000 the family managed to raise in 1972 - an interactive computer that would allow Rick to write out his thoughts using the slight head-movements that he could manage. Rick came to call it "my communicator." A cursor would move across a screen filled with rows of letters, and when the cursor highlighted a letter that Rick wanted, he would click a switch with the side of his head.

When the computer was originally brought home, Rick surprised his family with his first "spoken" words. They had expected perhaps "Hi, Mom" or "Hi, Dad." But on the screen Rick wrote "Go Bruins." The Boston Bruins were in the Stanley Cup finals that season, and his family realized he had been following the hockey games along with everyone else. "So we learned then that Rick loved sports," said Dick.

In 1975, Rick was finally admitted into a public school. Two years later, he told his father he wanted to participate in a five-mile benefit run for a local lacrosse player who had been paralyzed in an accident. Dick, far from being a long-distance runner, agreed to push Rick in his wheelchair. They finished next to last, but they felt they had achieved a triumph. That night, Dick remembers, "Rick told us he just didn’t feel handicapped when we were competing."

Rick’s own accomplishments, quite apart from the duo’s continuing athletic success, have included his moving on from high school to Boston University, where he graduated in 1993 with a degree in special education. That was followed a few weeks later by another entry in the Boston Marathon. As he fondly pictured it: "On the day of the marathon from Hopkinton to Boston people all over the course were wishing me luck, and they had signs up which read `congratulations on your graduation!’"

Rick now works at Boston College’s computer laboratory helping to develop a system code named "Eagle Eyes," through which mechanical aids (like for instance a powered wheelchair) could be controlled by a paralyzed person’s eye-movements, when linked-up to a computer.

Together the Hoyts don’t only compete athletically; they also go on motivational speaking tours, spreading the Hoyt brand of inspiration to all kinds of audiences, sporting and non-sporting, across the country.

Excerpt from article “Team Hoyt, Racing Towards Inclusion” by David Tereshchuk