June – For the Gospel’s Sake
Day 176 – 25 June
Shed what slows you
Let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us. (Hebrews 12:1, KJV)
A life gathers weight the way a coat pocket gathers odds and ends, slowly and almost invisibly, until one day you notice just how much you are lugging about. The commitments accept themselves one at a time, each reasonable on its own. The possessions accumulate, the subscriptions renew, the habits settle in, the worries take up lodging and decline to leave. Hardly any of it arrived as an obvious mistake, and that is exactly what makes it so hard to spot. Most of what slows us down is perfectly innocent in itself, a collection of good or harmless things that have simply piled up past the point of usefulness, until we find ourselves wondering why even simple movement now feels like wading through treacle. The writer to the Hebrews, reaching once more for the picture of a runner, named the remedy with a bracing economy.
Weight, not just sin
The word he chose was ὄγκος (onkos, meaning bulk, weight, or encumbrance), and the careful way he handled it repays attention. He told his readers to lay aside every weight, and then, as a separate item, the sin that so easily entangles them. That deliberate distinction is the key to the whole sentence. Sin, of course, must go, and few believers need persuading of that in principle. Yet ὄγκος (onkos, meaning weight) reaches wider than sin, naming anything at all that adds bulk and drag to the runner, whether or not it carries the slightest moral fault. A thing can be entirely innocent, even a thoroughly good thing, and still be exactly the weight that keeps you from running well. The extra commitment that crowds your calendar, the comfortable routine grown a shade too comfortable, the worry you keep turning over, the possession that over time comes to possess you in return, none of these may be sins, and every one of them can be a weight. This is a subtler and more searching call than a plain summons to abandon wickedness. It asks you to examine even the harmless cargo of your life and to ask, honestly, which of it is really helping you run, and which is merely slowing you down.
The clothes along the route
There is a strange and rather beautiful sight to be seen along the route of any big marathon, especially on a cold morning. The roadsides, for the first few miles, become littered with clothing, gloves and woolly hats and fleeces and old jumpers, flung aside by the thousands of runners streaming past. None of it was rubbish when they set out. In the chill of the start line every one of those layers was sensible, even necessary, keeping muscles warm and nerves steady against the cold. Yet a mile or two in, as the body heats and the race takes hold, the very same garment that was a comfort becomes a burden, a flapping, sweating weight the runner can no longer afford to carry, and so, without breaking stride, they peel it off and let it drop. The wise runner feels no sentiment about it. What helped at the beginning would hinder at the end, and reaching the finish matters far more than holding on to a jacket. Our own lives ask the same clear-eyed honesty of us. Plenty of what we carry served us well once and has gradually become dead weight, and learning to let it fall, mid-stride and without fuss, is part of what it means to run the race in earnest. As this week keeps before us, the goal we run toward is bound up with the gospel itself, and that goal is worth shedding a great deal to reach unhindered.
Declaration
I am learning to travel light, setting down the many weights I have gathered over the years. Some of what I carry is plainly worth keeping, and some is plainly worth dropping, yet a great deal of it falls into a third category, harmless in itself and simply too heavy to keep hauling toward what matters most. So I take an honest look at the load on my back, the commitments and distractions and comforts that have piled up almost without my noticing, and I begin to lay aside whatever fails to serve the goal ahead. I would sooner move freely toward something worthwhile than stay weighed down by a hundred things that merely fill my arms. Today I shed the excess and run unburdened, sure that a lighter life, fixed on what counts most, will carry me further than one cluttered with everything at once.
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