Run your race, by his grace.

Two of our sons, Philip and Sam, ran cross country in high school. They were 4 years apart in school, so we had 8 straight years of cross country meets in the fall. And we loved that.

Cross country is an excellent sport. First, everyone makes the team. There are unlimited spots. There are serious runners, runners getting in shape for another sport, kids trying to see if they like it and kids who have never done any kind of sport but they are hoping to get in better physical shape. And while technique and form matter, as long as you can run, you can be on the team.

Second, everyone gets to play. There is no bench. The top 7 are varsity runners and you might be JV, but everyone runs every meet until you get to the district playoffs.

Third, it is a life sport. As long as your body is holding up ok, you can run. You don’t need anything but a decent pair of shoes, shorts and a t-shirt and off you go. If you can’t run, maybe you can walk. (I pole vaulted in high school. I wasn’t ever very good at it, but if I tried it now? I couldn’t get off the ground at all. I’d just crash into the big foam pad at the end of the runway and hope the pole didn’t land on me. It’s not a “life sport.”)

But it was at the meets that I grew to appreciate the true beauty of the sport of cross country and its value as a metaphor for life.

I was, of course, interested in seeing how our team fared, including the top runners. Who would win the races, the boys’ and girls’ races? But as the races went on, I noticed that people were cheering all of the runners, urging them to push themselves hard, letting them know how much farther they had to go, anything to help them along.

And as the race went on, they would cheer loudest for the slowest runners. The winners would be done in 15, 16, 18 minutes, but there would be runners on the course for 30 or 35 minutes, maybe more in some cases. So when you see a kid who is out there that long, battling, striving, pushing themselves, you just have to cheer them on. Maybe they are heavyset. Maybe they are battling an injury. Maybe they’re new to the sport and never done anything like this before in their lives. We had one girl on our team whose left ankle was permanently turned in about 45 degrees, but she ran. How can you not cheer them on?

You see, every runner, from the fastest to the slowest is running first and foremost against themselves. You get in the race and it is you against yourself. Not the clock, the clock just measures time. It’s your will against your body. It’s the decisions you made for practice, diet, hydration and sleep, week after week, month after month, year after year. Your preparation and execution of a plan to improve greatly affects your results. But it’s always you against you.

And that is why it works very well as an analogy or metaphor for life and for faith. We hear Paul using it to reflect on his own life. He has trained hard. He has run hard. He has overcome many obstacles. As he looks back over his shoulder, he feels confident he has done his utmost in service to the highest good, The Lord.

We are very prone to measure ourselves against others, to establish ourselves in our social groups at every level. And there is a real and constant temptation in that.

If you want to ruin your life, compare yourself to others. The damage from that sort of thinking cuts a lot of ways. We will develop hardened hearts towards those we think we are better than, built on an array of assumptions that may or may not be accurate but will always yield a ridiculously incomplete picture. And we will also have a ridiculously incomplete picture of those we think are better than we are. They may look like they have everything under control and without a problem in the world, but that’s simply not ever true.

And the fruit of that sort of thinking is awful; resentment, envy, jealousy and spite, to name a few.

Let’s go back to the cross country meet for a moment. Imagine if the winners – say the top three – finished their races and then went back to watch the slower kids struggling to finish and made comments like, prayers like, “O God, I’m so glad I’m not fat or slow or physically challenged…”

So don’t ever fall into that type of thinking, about yourself for life generally or for your faith.

Far better to compare yourself to where you were yesterday, a week ago, a month ago, 10 years ago with Christ being your goal and standard.

“Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against thee
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone…”

You humble yourself that way, then you are able to see where you are and where he’s calling you forward.

And if you’re struggling at the back of the pack, we’ll cheer you on.

AMEN! Two of our sons, Philip and Sam, ran cross country in high school. They were 4 years apart in school, so we had 8 straight years of cross country meets in the fall. And we loved that.