Like I Never Felt Before

Aaron Shust borrows Paul's image of a runner training for a race in "Like I Never Felt Before" — "been training all this time, I'm at the starting line, a marathon I'm gonna have to run, in such a way as if to win the prize... all the athletes from days gone by are in the stadium surrounding me." The great cloud of witnesses becomes a literal crowd at a literal race.

"I sacrificed the things that held me down, and concentratedly I fixed my gaze" keeps the runner's discipline specific — not vague spiritual growth, but the deliberate removal of things that were slowing him down. "I ran through the open door" marks a clear beginning rather than a gradual drift into new experience.

"You taught me to crawl, You taught me to stand, You taught me run one step at a time... you taught me to live, you taught me to die, you taught me to spread my wings and how to fly" closes the song by naming a whole sequence of stages, treating each one as something learned rather than simply arrived at.