Running to Win

            There are a number of great lines in that first reading – lines worth holding onto. Verse 2, “O Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me.” There is a model for prayer there – the importance of turning to God in the midst of our distress, and the experience it speaks to of being drawn up by God out of the abyss. Verse 11 (similar in some ways): “You have turned my mourning into dancing; you have taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy.”   What a beautiful image of God’s transforming power at work in our lives.

            But my favorite in this psalm, verse 5, “For [God’s] anger is but for a moment; his favor is for a lifetime.” And then, right behind it, “Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.”

            If you’ve had the experience of lying awake at 2 or 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning, then you know how easy it is to become anxious in those lonely hours, and how life itself can begin to feel pretty bleak. The psalmist’s words, “Weeping may linger for the night” capture that sense. “But joy,” he writes, “comes with the morning.” And that’s the reality: when we turn to God and experience the depths of his love, his faithfulness and care, then hope itself – like light breaking in through our bedroom windows – begins to flood our being once more.

What I love about the psalms is that they don’t sugarcoat life. They don’t pretend that if you just have enough faith that everything is going to be great. Life can be tough, and the psalmists recognize that. The experience of loss, of betrayal, of setbacks and illness and struggle – read the psalms and it is all there.   That’s part of life, and the psalmists don’t hide from it.

But they don’t stop there. What they also knew was the difference God makes in the midst of it. Who or what can draw us up out of the black abyss of despair? Where do we turn if we are to have our mourning transformed into dancing, our sackcloth exchanged for joy? The psalmist here got it exactly right: there is only one answer and it doesn’t lie with us or with our own efforts. No, God alone offers that hope that all of us need; the hope that gives us the strength to continue on.

And you have to know that and believe in that for our second lesson to make any sense. Paul compares the Christian walk to an athlete preparing him or herself for competition. He talks about punishing his body and exercising self-control in every area of his life all for the sake of winning the prize. What prize? We can understand an Olympic athlete taking on that kind of grueling discipline in the hopes of winning a medal, but us? Is our faith really that important to us?

Almost forty years ago, in my sophomore year of college, I realized that I was having a miserable time playing rugby. I loved the practices. I loved the game itself. But five minutes into every match my lungs would be burning and I’d find myself wondering how I was going to make it to the half. The game was played continuously. There were no time-outs. No breaks between plays. No substitutions. If someone was injured you simply played a man down. And I was dying out there. All I could think about was surviving the next thirty five minutes to make it to the half or the forty beyond to the end of the game. It wasn’t rugby anymore. It was an endurance contest – a form of torture.

So a friend and I started getting up early every morning before classes and working out. We would do a loop of the entire campus – later on, it was two loops – and it always included one long, continuous upgrade along one entire side of the school. That hill was where we would push it: stretching out our stride, pushing ourselves harder and harder each week. My legs would be burning. My lungs felt like they were going to explode, but every morning we’d make the turn at the bottom of the hill and begin to push. And what a difference it made.

By the end of that season my experience of the game had completely changed. I wasn’t thinking about how to conserve my energy, or how to catch my breath anymore. It wasn’t about just getting to the half or to the end of the game. No, now I was thinking about where I needed to be – where the holes were in our defense, or where there was an opportunity that we might take advantage of. All I was thinking about was where I wanted to be, and I could do, almost effortlessly. It wasn’t about survival anymore. It was about having fun and winning.

That’s what Paul is talking about here: making changes in our behavior for the sake of something greater. But how many of us really think of the Christian faith that way? How many of us would be willing to take on something similar to the pain or sacrifice of climbing that hill each morning just so we might be closer to Jesus?

That’s really what the spiritual disciplines are all about.  “Discipline” of course, shares the same root as “discipleship.” A disciple, a follower of Jesus, is someone who willingly takes on various disciplines in order to open their lives more and more to God. Oftentimes when we think of discipline we think of something dour and oppressive; something to be avoided rather than embraced. But that’s got it exactly wrong. The Christian disciplines – such disciplines as tithing, daily prayer, study, service, and corporate worship – are the very practices that can set us free, and help us know and experience this life at its best and fullest.

There is a wonderful picture on the cover of this month’s “Christianity Today”. It is of a bunch of Cambodian children gathered around a new well, playing in the fresh, clean water streaming from it. An estimated one million children die from drinking unclean water each year. Clean water can prevent all kinds of health problems and dramatically reduce infant mortality. In fact, one study suggests it can reduce it by as much as 35 to 50% in rural villages.

So that picture of these children playing and laughing and drenched in water is pretty powerful: they’re playing in the very water that can save their lives. But there is one child, in particular, who caught my eye. It is a little boy off to the right. He is the one working the handle, and he’s hanging from it with both hands, a huge smile on his face.

Someone might say, “Wait a minute, he’s doing all the work. It is because of him and his efforts that all the other kids are having so much fun, so how could he be happy?” But you take a look, and what you’ll see is sheer joy written across his face – the kind of joy I found on the rugby pitch after all those morning workouts, the kind of joy the Apostle found in the pursuit of Christ with all his heart and soul and strength.

We don’t take on the disciplines because we are trying to prove our worth to God or change God’s attitude towards us. They won’t. God’s love for us is unconditional and nothing we do or don’t do is going to change that. We take on the disciplines, rather, because we want to. Like running up that hill each morning, we make the sacrifice because of what it will mean for us – we make it because like the psalmist we’ve come to realize that it is there in God that we find life at its very best; there that we find this power at work in our lives what can turn the weeping of the night into the great, abounding joy of dawn.

Have you made the choice to become a follower of Jesus? If so, then what disciplines will you take on to open your life more and more to him?