Rick Meyer is a pastor who's also run over 143,000 miles since he was 11 years old.

Which is a combination I've never had on the podcast before.

I brought him on to talk about faith and fitness.
How discipline actually gets built.
Why people who show up for their families and jobs still struggle to show up for their own health.

Rick has a mantra he uses when he runs — I can't. Christ can. We are.

He talks about training as stewardship. You take care of your body so you can better serve the people in your life.

Whether you're religious or not, that framing hits different than "I want to lose 20 pounds."

But that's not the part I want to talk about.

Halfway through, I told Rick something I don't usually bring up on the podcast — that I grew up religious, that Christianity shaped a lot of my character, and that at some point I lost the faith itself.

The values stuck. The belief didn't.

And then I asked him a question I've been chewing on for years.

I call it the Blood Diamond Problem, because that's where I first really thought about it.

If you've not seen the Leonardo Dicaprio movie, it involves a kid in Africa who gets kidnapped by rebels, brainwashed, and turned into a child soldier. Eventually he ends up turning on his own family.

He didn't choose any of that. His environment made him.

So what happens to that kid? How does he get judged by a God he was never given a fair chance to know?

And there are billions of people like that — not in the same circumstance, but people who've never heard about Christianity, or heard about it but grew up somewhere it couldn't stick.

If salvation only runs through Jesus, where does that leave them?

I've heard a lot of religious people try to answer that question. Most of the answers don't hold up for me.

Rick's did. And it's not because he had some perfect scripture that closed the case — but because he was willing to just say he didn't fully understand it.

He said faith reaches people in ways he can't explain. And then he said something a lot of religious leaders won't — that certainty is a bad look, including for him.

I don't know if I'd say we agreed. But I felt like I got an honest answer from someone who'd actually thought about it, which is all I really want in these conversations.

We got into:

Farm-life discipline and why it's the closest thing to fitness discipline
Rick's mantra: "I can't. Christ can. We are."
Why motivation and discipline are two sides of the same coin, not opposites
The weird similarities between getting to the gym and getting to church
Gratitude as a performance tool (there's actual psychology behind it)
Why Rick thinks Christians have an obligation to take care of their bodies
The Blood Diamond Problem and Rick's honest answer
What happens to people who never hear about Jesus
Why "I don't know" is the most honest thing anyone can say about the big stuff
Why I still value the Christian character I grew up with, even without the faith

This one probably isn't for everyone. But if you've ever tried to reconcile the values you grew up with against the beliefs you can't quite hold onto anymore — this conversation might hit home.

Find Rick's books here: Leadership Books
Speakers Bureau: here
Instagram: @rickmeyer9014
TikTok: @running.on.faith3