UPHILL BATTLES

Ezekiel 44:1-45:12; 1 Peter 1:1-12; Psalm 119:17-32; Proverbs 28:8-10

“For this is what the Sovereign Lord says: Enough, you…! Stop your violence and oppression and do what is just and right. Quit robbing and cheating my people out of their land. Stop expelling them from their homes, says the Sovereign Lord. Use only honest weights and scales and honest measures, both dry and liquid.”

“ All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is by his great mercy that we have been born again, because God raised Jesus Christ from the dead. Now we live with great expectation, and we have a priceless inheritance—an inheritance that is kept in heaven for you, pure and undefiled, beyond the reach of change and decay. And through your faith, God is protecting you by his power until you receive this salvation, which is ready to be revealed on the last day for all to see. So be truly glad. There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you have to endure many trials for a little while. These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold—though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world.”

“Open my eyes to see the wonderful truths in your instructions. I am only a foreigner in the land. Don’t hide your commands from me!”

“God detests the prayers of a person who ignores the law. Those who lead good people along an evil path will fall into their own trap, but the honest will inherit good things.”

It was a balmy, humid Spring day. We were ready to run for a share of the District championship. The opposing coach walked us around the cross country course, until he came to a dirt road winding off in the woods. “The finish line is just a little ways up that road. No point to walking that; we’ll just have to turn around and walk out again.” We took him at his word and returned to the starting line. Roughly 45 minutes later, we had covered the course for real and entered the road in the woods for the last leg of our race. Running as a team, we had a clear advantage. The road took a few turns then began an uphill climb. We had been running hard and had little left in the tank but figured that was OK because the finish had to be just up ahead, as the coach had said. The road got steeper with no end in sight. Suddenly, guys started cramping. The finish remained out of our field of vision. We began to crumble as a team. Guys started quitting left and right, and no amount of encouragement or berating by our own coach had any effect. The hill was too steep; we had no idea how far we had to go; and we lost heart. Soon enough, the home team caught and passed us, going right through the middle of our group like we were standing still (which we pretty much were by that point). I finished the race, barely, but none of that is what I most often reflect on when I think of that day. The thing I most graphically recall is the memory of my teammate fallen not 20 yards from the finish. He fell just short of the last bend in the road which would have revealed the end of the course. I still wonder today whether, if he’d known where the end was, he’d have found the strength to finish the race.

How like life that episode was! The final hill was bad enough on its own. What destroyed us as a team and individually, though, was the fact that we did not know where the finish was. We could not set a goal because we knew not the length of the road. And because we were so fundamentally unprepared (and sandbagged by the opposing coach!), we could not muster the stamina to endure or to finish what we started. We were tested and found wanting mainly because we could not fathom the end of our trials.

In a world that only tells us what it wants us to know so it can take advantage of our ignorance, we need to be a lot more strategic about our approach to life. We don’t know where the end lies or what it will actually take to carry us there. We only know it’s likely we’ll lose some of our teammates before we cross the finish line, and that parts of the race will be a tough up hill climb. So, what do we do? How can we prepare for a contest without a predictable end and which we do not and could not possibly fully understand?

First, play fair with others. We need teammates to sustain us and hold us up. Moreover, it sounds trite, but we really should treat others the way we’d like to be treated. That opposing coach immeasurably cheapened his team’s victory by setting us up to fail. He gave his team an unfair leg up, so all they had to do was come in behind us and mop up when we fell. There was little glory in what he’d left for them to do to “win” the race. It was not really a victory at all, but it did present a clear moral. We never know when or how the tables may get turned. A couple of weeks later, that opposing coach and his team were totally disqualified from any further competitions that year because the District athletic department determined their course did not meet standard cross country requirements.

Second, understand that trials can purify, and take advantage of every opportunity to claim the benefits of adversity whenever it arises. Fortitude and stamina are not spiritual gifts; they are learned behaviors. Trials may define our limitations for a season, but they also invite us to live beyond our capabilities in radical reliance on Spirit power, if we will have it.

Most of us spend far too much time running from or trying to avoid trials. What we should be doing is embracing and adapting to difficulties as the purifying fires they are intended to be for us. We cannot avoid trouble. Jesus promised it would find us, whether we went looking for it or not. What we can’t avoid, we should try learning something from. God did not create us to be unprepared. We need to scout the course fully before beginning a new journey, and not take anyone else’s word for what we will have to experience along the way. We also need to learn how to rejoice greatly at all times. There is a plan, and we are part of it! The fact that we cannot see it all the way from one end to another says more about our maturity than it says about our wisdom. We all get lost from time to time, or lose our bearings, at least. Our one solace is that the Spirit will bring us home and will stay by our side throughout, as long as we are sure to keep Him on our team and claim His strength.