Day 35: The Final Stretch

Day 35:  The Final Stretch
 
Five days to go in the 40-Day Fast. I can be tempted to view the remaining days as the final moments before relief, a “just hold on a little longer, you can do it” frame of mind—survival mentality as it were. That would be an expected and respectable response to 40 days of any kind of increased rigor whether spiritual, physical, mental, or dietary. Discipline can be tiring, boring, unrewarding and even masochistic.
 
But I am discovering something different that catches me by surprise. Rather than this being the beginning of the end, I think this could be the best stage of all. A final stretch that has me not just reaching for the finish line but accelerating past it.
 
5 weeks with 5 days to go
I’m no athlete but I am a dedicated lap swimmer, slow but steady in my workouts. The first 100 is easy: I’m fresh, energized, my muscles aren’t tired. The next several hundred, however, I feel myself tiring. I have to breathe a little more often and concentrate on pulling my hands through the water, keeping up my kick. However, by the time I reach my 800- , 900-meter mark, I’ve found my groove. My heart beats hard but strong, my kick has found the rhythm to match my stroke, each slice of my arm through the water brings a feeling of more power as I finally settle into ideal aerodynamics. Sometimes the feeling is so good in the final stretch, I don’t want to stop and switch into the next part of my workout.
 
It’s near to feeling that way now, not that the past 5 weeks have made me a superior follower of Christ, increased my virtues or performance, or made me any more holier. Rather, it’s the feeling of finding a new groove, of finally putting the mechanics into place so that what used to feel hard has lost some of the fatigue of the trying, replaced instead with a new conscious level of understanding of who God is and how his kingdom works.
 
When I swim, throughout my routine I’m in the same water, operating under the same conditions, using the same equipment. I don’t pop a few steroids or stop for an energy boost in the middle. Nothing changes from the beginning of my swim to the end. The longer I swim, the more nothing changes. But as I swim and push against the resistance, I slowly find my stride, and that takes me to a new level.
 
Dark horses
This summer I went to the racetracks for the first time. Our friends have a box at Arlington Park in the Chicago suburbs where you can watch the horses race live on Arlington track as well as watch live feeds from other premier racetracks like Churchill Downs, Pimlico and Belmont. The box is under the eaves and right in front of the finish line. From there you can see the horses rounding the final corner, pounding down the home stretch, jockeys astraddle, tails flying, heads, necks, hooves galloping to the finish.
 
My favorite races are the ones where a horse comes from behind, creeping forward through the pack, and with a final unexpected burst of acceleration eclipses the leader to win the heat.
 
What impresses me is not so much that the horse beats out the winner as the energy, strength, and muscle these colts and fillies gather in the final stretch to sail home. Somewhere in that final stretch, the jockey working with the horse knows when that horse can accelerate to a level of performance that has the horse using more of its potential.
 
That comes with practice. It comes form a jockey knowing his horse. It’s a combination of diet and exercise, healthful habits, rest, and, yes, ability, too.
 
Homestretch
In my homestretch I feel like I’m finally getting it. God as my jockey is using the feeble practices of this fast to take me to a new level, to give me a new awareness of His life in me.
 
What does that look like? For me, it’s discovering His hand in my everyday life, not just looking for intervention through the miraculous. Instead of backing away with excuses, it’s accepting and engaging in the exercise – the hard work – of wrestling with thoughts, ideas, perceptions, and questions, and not just settling for what I thought I believed or what others have told me to believe.
 
It’s a growing openness to the likely possibility—okay, to the growing certainty that my idea of happiness falls short of God’s. It is acknowledging my sin (see Day 31) and all the ways that I am not God. It is a re-gathering of all that I am in the direction of God.
 
I’m reminded of what Paul writes in Romans 12:1-2 about being transformed and renewed, quoted here in  Eugene Peterson’s translation, The Message:
 
So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

I’m looking at the final stretch to be a good stretch in every meaning of the word: a time to not wind down and relax, but to let God use the new elasticity He’s creating in me to not huff and puff to the end but to send me soaring past the finish line.

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