Run Your Race!

“Let us run with endurance the race set before us…”

Hebrews 12:1b

I don’t like to run.  I never have. When I was a kid, and I had to run any kind of race for gym class, I was very quickly winded and out of breath.  While some speak of a “runner’s high” I know of no such experience. I am not a runner.  Of course, I don’t need to tell any of you that.  One look at my body and its obvious, I am not a runner.  So when I talk and write in this blog today about “running your race” you could, with great justification, ask, “What does he know about running?”  Let me just defend myself that I bring a different perspective to running a race.  I bring the perspective of someone who finds “running” to be difficult.

That all said, right now it feels like we are in a particularly tough part of the race.  At times, right now it may feel like we are having to run uphill and against the wind.  This COVID 19 shut down was supposed to last 2 weeks.  We are in week 8 or 9.  I just read an article online that in Illinois churches may not be allowed to open for a year or more.  (Glad I live in Texas.) The economy we were told was going to come “roaring back” stronger than ever.  The reality is that people are still losing their jobs.  The markets are still mostly down.  The truth is, we don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know when we will reach the top of this hill and be able, at last, to run downhill for a while.

At times like this, when life seems to be a wearing, tiresome race… when you find yourself wearing out – how do you keep going. Yet that is what the writer of Hebrews tells us to do.   He writes, “run with endurance.”  Grind it out.  Keep going.  “How do you do that?”  That’s something I think we can learn from real runners.  Dr. Ferry, my former boss, loves to run.  He has run in the Boston Marathon. One day, sitting in his office, we were talking about these words from Hebrews 12.  He shared with me that one of the keys to successfully running a marathon is take and drink water every time its offered to you.  If  you wait till you are thirsty to take a drink it’s already too late.  You will dehydrate.  You won’t finish the race.  In a long race you need to drink water every time its offered.  It’s the same in the race of faith.  God, in His love, has provided regular, weekly, even daily watering stations along the way – places where He invites us to drink the living water of His grace.  We call them = churches, worship, Bible studies, small groups, Word and Sacrament.  At each of these opportunities He holds out to us the soul renewing, faith sustaining power of His Holy Spirit.  How do we run with endurance the race marked out for us?  By drinking the water of life every time He offers it to us. This is especially true right now as we run uphill, against the wind, in this particularly tough part of the race.

Of course there is the other question - “Why should you keep running?” That’s what I thought in every race I ever entered.  Why should I run?  After all, there was no way I was ever going to win.  Perhaps, that is how we feel in life’s race.  There’s no way you or I will ever win.  Is there?   Well let me share a story with you. “In 1981 Bill Broadhurst entered the Pepsi Challenge 10,000-meter race in Omaha, Nebraska. Surgery ten years earlier for an aneurysm in his brain had left him paralyzed on his left side. But on that misty July morning, he stood with twelve hundred lithe men and women at the starting line. The gun sounded, and the crowd surged ahead. Bill threw his stiff left leg forward and pivoted on it as his foot hit the ground. His slow plop-plop-plop rhythm seemed to mock him as the pack raced into the distance. Sweat rolled down his face and pain pierced his ankle, but he kept going. Some of the runners completed the race in about thirty minutes, but it was two hours and twenty-nine minutes until Bill reached the finish line. A man approached from a small group of remaining bystanders. Though exhausted, Bill recognized him from pictures in the newspaper. It was Bill Rodgers, the famous marathon runner, who then draped his newly won Boston Marathon medal around Bill’s neck.” (from “Disciplines of a Godly Man” by R. Kent Hugh). 

That’s why you keep running.  That’s what God has in store for you and me.  There is no way you and I will ever win this race.  However, our Savior Jesus already has won it.  On the day, when you or I finally complete this race and cross the finish line, He’ll be there waiting for us.  He will take the crown of life, the one He already won and set it on your head and mine.  You and I may not be runners… but by faith we run after one who is – Jesus who already won the race for us. Amen