The focus we need to reach the finish line
by Gordon MacDonald
Forty years ago I was a track and cross-country runner. I loved running competitively on the track, but I hated the cross-country course. Too long, too demanding, too painful! But I had a coach who said the price of competing in track was running cross-country. So I did both.
Anyone who has competed in cross-country knows it to be a team sport - the team that puts its first five runners across the finish line wins. There's a lot of psychology in such a competition - in the way you run against your opponents, promote inter-squad encouragement, and strategise to run the race together.
Good cross-country teams usually have a lead runner - the star - who sets the pace. The other six runners normally run in relation to the pace set by the star. It's a good system as long as the star runs, well, like a star. If he falters, the entire team can be affected.
In one particular race our star did falter. Halfway along the course, he simply stopped running and sat down. He quit! The sight of him sitting there so unnerved our usually strong team that each of us in turn was tempted to stop and sit down with him. But none of us did, and we managed to win without him.
Which brings me to the subject of perseverance and the sports metaphor that the writer of Hebrews 12 may have had in mind. For cross-country competition is an ancient sport, and surely these kinds of mind games were being played 20 centuries ago.
"Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith," the wirter urged. The word author implies something begun; the word perfecter suggests something finished, brought to its full completion. And the word faith refers to the body of truth around which the Christian has organised his or her life.
Now the "star" in the metaphorical race is Jesus. The rest of the runners in the competition (so Heb. 12:3 hints) are people who are being beat up by a life of opposition or competition which may even involve overt persecution. One gets the feeling that the writer is motivated by reports of people who are counting the cost of a tough life of faith and (like the lead runner of our cross-country team) are contemplating sitting down.
Quitters
Now this is where the issue becomes personal.
Several years ago my mother died, and I had the responsibility to notify
some distant relatives. In one of those conversations, a cousin made a
disturbing comment. Speaking of my mother's seven brothers and sisters
(all of whom, like her, had died at an early age), she said, "They were
all quitters; the moment life got difficult, they all laid down and died."
"The were all quitters." I conjured up the memory of the star by the side of the running trail. Could this attribute come down trough the genes, and might it be descriptive of me? I wondered. While I loved and honoourd my mother, I could not help, in the light of this comment, but look back across her life and remember the many intentions, objectives, and dreams she'd never seen through to completion. The one single exception was her commitment to raise her two sons. But still I could not deny an obvious quitting streak in her character.
That caused me to compare my life against that paradigm. I realised that the streak might be in my genes, also: certain scholastic goals not achieved, a suspicion that I have done many things in my life marginally rather than excellently, a recurrent temptation to give up too easily on certain visions and initiatives I said I really believed in. This discovery was unsettling. More than once I, too, had sat down at the side of the course of life when I should have kept going.
And this point reaches its greatest pertinence in terms of faith. Because my first name is Thomas, I have often commiserated with that disciple with whom I share a common name, for he and I have been doubters. I struggle to follow through on my beliefs and commitments, always wondering if there are better alternatives or more sure paths. Take it from an expert: Lots of energy is expended in the doubting, skeptical lifestyle. The temptation to quit is never far away.
And so, for me, the question arises with regularity: do you intend to finish the course? The course of character-building, of faithfulness to commitments with friends and family, of the intention to enlarge spiritual disciplines leading to a greater knowledge of God, of serving your generation - giving back more than you have taken?
The Star
For Jesus, the star in this chapter, the
peak issue was the cross. Endure it? Or run from it? The ridicule and rejection
of the crowds. Resist it? Or cave in to its pressure? Who can calculate
the pressure that bore down on Jesus in those final hours from garden to
grave? And from what source did He acquire the soul-power to finish strong?
Credit a strong sense of mission (He knew why He had come into the world). The affirmations of the ever-present heavenly Father. The anointing of the Holy Spirit. The promise of resurrection. The "go" decision that led to the cross and ultimate suffering seems to have been finalised on the Mount of Transfiguration and perhaps reaffirmed one more time in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Take on the suffering of a martyr's death? Accept the weight of the sins of all humanity? Handle the rejection of virtually the entire human race? Take a hard look at the "star's" pain, the writer seems to be saying. He has set the standard. Study His performance. He didn't sit down; He ran straight toward the finish line. And only then did He sit down when and where it was appropriate to sit: at the right hand of His Father. What a picture!
Quitting, sitting down, seems real attractive at times, no matter how badly you once wanted to win the race. The temptation might come when there is undue fatigue and the threshold of pain becomes close to unbearable. To drop out of the race becomes attractive when those around you show no enthusiasm for your dreams and convictions, when your critics (or enemies) mount a wave of critique that questions everything from your integrity and your motives to your wisdom.
To stop sounds real good when you look at others and they appear more comfortable, more successful, more appreciated, and more rewarded. Stopping seems to make sense when all your plans and expectations simply dissolve in a cloud of failure or inadequacy. And quitting the race seems the thing to do when you permit yourself to go "dry-of-soul" and there seems no longer to be any resolve from deep within. The dream is dead, the enthusiasm is gone, and the resources have dried up. So quit!
A Model Finish
Once, overwhelmed by exhaustion, loneliness,
and near burnout, William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, wrote a
letter to his wife, Katherine, in which he brooded about sitting down.
"I wonder whether I could not get something to do in London, of some kind, some secretaryship, or something respectable that would keep us going. I know how difficult things are to obtain without friends or influence, as I am fixed. But we must hope against hope, I suppose."
I smell quitting! But Katherine wrote him one of her famous, uplifting letters, and he got a second wind. And so, in effect, the Salvation Army was rescued from oblivion.
One looks to Jesus because He is the "star." What He begins, He finishes. And if you are a runner you feel assured and inspired because you know the star is going to take you right to the finish line.
The biblical writers create the largest frame of reference: He, Jesus, was there at the beginning of creation, John says, and He will be there to oversee the creation of a new heaven and a new earth - quite an expanse of time and effort. Says something about His eternal resilience.
He selected disciples and "loved them to the end." This unattractive, unlikable, flippant, unreliable gathering of simple men. Men who never seemed to "get it" when He spoke of dying and cross-bearing, who ran away at the first hint of opposition in the garden, who denied knowing Him, who drew swords when He'd said that sword-drawing was not the way. Men whom I would not have picked myself or probably would have ditched along the way. But He, the star, finished with them and caused them to become some of the most remarkable, world-changing men history has ever known. Says something about His unyielding faithfulness to stick with people.
He came to seek the lost, He said often enough. And He sought them right up and over the mount of Calvary and down to a grave. "It is finished," He cried when He surrendered His Spirit into the hands of a Father who appeared to have hidden Himself at the peak moment. Says something about the reliability of His saving effort to reconcile people to God.
He finished in the simple things: paying taxes, attending to children, going to the grave of a friend, worshiping in the synagogue ("as was His custom"), providing a home for His mother, and seeking her care in His hours of maximum suffering. He cared to the end when a dying criminal asked His help. He went back to Galilee to seek a failure by the name of Gor…I mean Simon Peter. Says something about His integrity and commitment to detail.
No unkept promises, no abandoned intentions, no friends let down, no mission left unfulfilled. Is there anything He didn't finish?
So Run, Run, Run
Yesterday I sat with a man who is very
sick with cancer. His hair is gone, his legs look like my wrists, tumours
bulge from several parts of his body. Rising to greet someone, taking a
bath, concentrating for 30 minutes are now major accomplishments. As I
sat with him talking about the exigencies of dying, I was aware of the
extreme modesty of his home and material surroundings.
But I was also reminded that he has given 37 years to being second-in-command at a Christian school. When headmasters came and went, he was always ready to step in and "run the store" until another leader arrived and took over. When the school was broke, he and his wife sacrificed full salary. When there came the inevitable moments when the constituency gossiped and haggled among themselves, he simply stuck to his job and commitment to educate students.
Lesser men and women would have quit a hundred times over; folks of lesser character would have demanded more money or gone elsewhere to get it. Some would have competed for the top spot in the school's hierarchy; some would have become embittered because praise and adulation were often in short supply.
But not Ray Martin. Quiet-spoken, committed to routines, accurate in the details, he stuck in the race. In the 25 years I've known him, I've never heard him complain, criticise, fight back, or demand recognition. He just did his job while fixing his eyes on Jesus. And if this illness is going to take him across the finish line, only then will he sit down - but the place of sitting will be where Jesus is - at the right hand.
No gimmicks here. No seven steps to perseverance. No pep rallies. And no heaped up emotion. Just due diligence to run, and run, and run. And if there is a bad moment, to get up and run again.
Looking to Jesus
And so I also, coming from a maternal
line of so-called quitters, look to Jesus as the star in my race. And I
pace myself against Him. I rest in His saving effort; I am inspired by
the model of His performance.
My grandfather MacDonald (paternal side) was not a quitter. He ran a great race as a missionary leader carrying a vision of preaching the good news of Christ to the people of Eastern Europe and in the great eastern cities of America. He was always ready to open the Bible and explain its contents to the one or many who were willing to listen. I can't imagine him sitting down if sitting meant quitting.
At the age of 80 he was in a rest home, his mind mostly gone, the result of what we used to call "hardening of the arteries." I went to visit him one day and found him sitting in a chair, dressed in a heavy woolen suite and tie. An open Bible lay on his lap.
It was a beastly hot day and there was no air conditioning. "Grandfather," I said, "why are you all dressed up?" "Oh," he said without hesitation, "you never know when some of the men and women down the hall might want to hear a little Bible reading. I need to be ready." Here was a man of incredible lifelong dignity whose body (among other things, he was incontinent) and whose mind (he hadn't the slightest idea who I was) could hardly function. But his eyes had been so set on Jesus, the star, for a lifetime of "running," that the habit of his heart (if not his mind and body) was to finish strong, even sprint past the line.
So which of these two family lines dominates my genes? The one that finds it easy to sit down and die when the going gets rough? Or the one that ran faithfully to the end? You can bet on which one I prefer.
