June – For the Gospel’s Sake
Day 177 – 26 June
Outlast the storm
For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised. (Hebrews 10:36, NASB)
Beginnings are easy, and almost everyone is good at them. The new project launches in a blaze of enthusiasm, the resolution feels unbreakable on the first of January, the fresh commitment seems certain to last forever in the warmth of its opening week. Yet a vast and sobering gap separates those who start from those who finish, and the ground between is littered with abandoned beginnings, every one of them undertaken with real sincerity at the time. What divides the small band who reach the end from the crowd who fall away along the route is rarely a matter of talent, and seldom even of the early zeal that everybody seems to possess in such abundance. It comes down instead to a humbler and far less glamorous quality, the plain ability to keep going when the thrill has long since evaporated. The New Testament has a word for that unshowy strength, and prizes it more highly than almost any other.
A word for staying under
The word is ὑπομονή (hypomonē, meaning endurance or patient perseverance), and within it lies a picture of remarkable sturdiness. At its root sits the idea of remaining underneath something, of staying put beneath a heavy load rather than scrambling out from under it. Endurance, in this sense, has little to do with passive waiting and everything to do with active, deliberate steadfastness, the courage to hold your position while the pressure bears down and the hours drag on. This is the great virtue of the long-distance runner rather than the sprinter, and the long-distance runner is exactly the figure the Bible keeps pressing on us. The Christian life was never sold as a brief, brilliant dash, but as a marathon stretching across the whole of one’s years, and the quality that carries a person to the far end of such a course is precisely this capacity to remain under the strain and keep moving. Heaven holds out a promise to those who endure to the finish, yet the writer is honest that endurance is exactly what we shall need, since the will of God, once we set about doing it, has a way of asking far more of our staying power than our opening enthusiasm ever bargained for.
The oak and its storms
An ancient oak has stood in the same field for three hundred years. Across those centuries it has met every kind of weather, the summer droughts that cracked the earth around it, the winter gales that stripped its branches and bent it nearly double, the lightning that scorched one flank and left it scarred for good. By every reasonable expectation such an assault should have destroyed it long ago, and yet there it still stands, broader and deeper and more immovable than ever. And one detail flips the entire story. Each storm that threatened to topple the tree in fact drove its roots further down into the soil, forcing it to grip the earth more firmly in order to survive, so that the very winds meant to bring it down became the making of its strength. A sapling would have snapped in the first real gale, but the oak was forged by exactly the storms it weathered. Something of the same hidden alchemy works in a human life that refuses to give up. The trials we endure, rather than merely wearing us thin, drive our own roots deeper and leave us steadier than before, until we find we can stand through things that would once have flattened us. This is why a faith that has kept running through hardship, year after year, grows so unshakeable, and why the goal we are pressing toward, bound up as it is with the gospel itself, is worth every long mile it asks of us.
Declaration
I am learning to keep going long after the first excitement has drained away. Starting things has always come easily to me, yet I am discovering that the real test arrives later, in the grey and unremarkable middle, when the thrill is gone and only the choice to carry on remains. So I refuse to measure my progress by how I feel on any given day, choosing instead to put one steady foot in front of the other even when the way is hard and the finish lies far out of sight. The difficulties I meet are slowly making me stronger rather than weaker, driving my roots deeper the way a storm only settles an old tree more firmly into the ground. Today I hold my ground and keep moving forward, certain that the one who simply refuses to stop will arrive, in the end, exactly where the quick starters never reached.
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