Slideshow image

Elias Kipchoge set the world record for the men’s marathon in Berlin at 2:01:09. This wasn’t a chance occurrence. As a child, he used to run 2 hours back and forth from school every day in his native Kenya. If that wasn’t hard enough, he was raised by a single mother and despite all this adversity, he is a 14x gold medalist in the marathon. This is the definition of enduring irrespective of the challenges around us.

God also has endurance about him. As a result, he tends to move over time. There is this grand narrative ark to just about everything he does. Here are some examples:

  • There is a masterfully laid out plan and history that has symmetry to it. We find that to introduce Jesus to the world there is a 14-generation script that plays out three times each. They are Abraham > David, David > Babylon, Babylon > Jesus.

  • The people of Israel throughout their history have had periods of freedom and slavery. In particular God works out his redemption story after 400 years of slavery in Egypt.

  • Today we see hundreds of years of the good news message of Jesus advancing throughout the world all starting with Paul’s simple missionary journeys.

We have a similar hope that the narrative ark of our life would follow this important trend. The Cortellucci family in Vaughn, Ontario is trying to do just that with a $40M donation that will forever shape a community hospital. Their immigration story is one where they decided to make an impact that would endure far beyond them.

As we think about endurance we need to be thinking about the things that will bear fruit far past the temporal.

What we recognize is that there are two curves in life:

  • One that describes our bodies. We tend to grow, peak, and then decline until we pass.

  • The other is where our inner selves go up and to the right throughout eternity. It’s this latter curve that we need to care most about.

To see this come to pass in our lives we need to build our lives on some timeless principles.

  1. Do the work now - we will have light affliction but it will have benefits far beyond today. Think about our roads, who paved them? What roads will you need to pave today in your life?

  2. Focus on the finish line - it’s helpful to work backward from where you need to be. In that way, you can develop a pace that’s achievable. There is a lot of talk about space exploration and MARS. It might sound far-fetched but you know what it takes. Just 7 months and 480M KM.

  3. Bias towards eternity - one of the beautiful things about empires is that they can make long-term bets. Think about David and Solomon building the temple, if they had a 4-year term there is no chance they build. It took them 7 years and maybe hundreds of millions of dollars, no taxpayer is signing up for that. But when we have eternity as our time horizon we can make long-term bets.

Ask God to give you insight into the big-picture narrative that he wants you to participate in. Sometimes you will be the initiator of that vision and other times you will be on the rocket ship.