Saturday April 28, 2007

…or maybe it’s the other way around.

These have been exciting days. 

She and I were in chapel together that day, after she boldly addressed all three sessions of World Views, and our speaker spoke on the topic of finishing the race and finishing it well.  Squeedgie leaned over and said, “I really don’t like to think of it as a race–it stresses me out.”  She had a point.

Personally, I’d rather look at my life as a journey.  But I’ll allow “race,” because—darn it—it’s a Biblical illustration.  Still, the thought of effort, stopwatches, scrutinizing fans and a barely discernable and incredibly distant finish-line tends to give me ulcers.  I’ve had a nifty collection of them (ulcers, that is) since 2005, each named individually…and renamed at the end of every year.  This year, the proud namesakes are Kristoff, Collin, Merritt, Taelyr, Adam and Austin.  Austin’s the odd man out here, because he never actually gave me acid-inducing stress, but he tried really hard to be worthy of an Aunt Michele glare, so he gets an ulcer named after him merely for effort.

The more I consider my aversion to racing and the realities of the racing metaphor, the more I realize how wrong I am to limit my life to the status of “journey.”  It truly is a journey in the sense that it’s an ongoing quest, a day by day exploration of potential, possibility and choice.  Yet if it is to be lived fully and in God’s exuberance, it must also have the elements of a race I have such a strong aversion to:

Effort: the will and determination to do more with one’s life that flow downstream on currents of circumstantial vagaries.

Stopwatches:  the awareness that our time is limited and that the end could come as soon as now.  This awareness of time ticking has less to do with biological clocks than with eternal urgency.  Which is a bit of a relief when the person writing the former sentence is a woman pushing forty!   

Scrutinizing fans:  they watch every step of the race, looking for the slightest weakness, the faintest hesitation, the subtlest injury.  They watch because what they see either validates or invalidates what we run for.  And we so often strut our stuff without thought for the discredit of our Maker our failures might produce.

A distant finish line:  a focus on the ending that is really a beginning…the impetus for perseverance and doggedness and relentless pursuit…the promise that the ending will be not only liberating, but sublimating.  If our course didn’t hold such a glorious finish line, the race would not be worth the effort.  How wonderful that the promise surpasses the exertion.

Thank you, Squeedgie, for prompting me to reevaluate the accuracy of just this one sports metaphor.  The fact that it came directly from God should have been sufficient evidence, but, you know…  We’re stubborn creatures!  Here’s to the race–and may we run it willingly and joyfully, despite the occasional hurdle and the seeming narrowness of our assigned lane. 

Anytime anyone feels like firing a starter pistol as a punctuation mark to this entry, you should most definitely feel free to do so!