Along the Way

Oswald Chambers states, in his devotional writings, My Utmost for His Highest, that we must begin with the end in view. Focusing on the destination keeps me on the right path following Jesus. It also gives me strength to endure whatever trial or obstacle may lay before me.

In John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, right from the beginning of Christian's journey, his friend, Evangelist, directed him, "Do you see yonder shining light?" He said, "I think I do." Then said Evangelist, "Keep that light in your eye, and go up directly thereto." And Buyan adds, "So I saw in my dream that the man began to run." Running for his life toward eternal life. What a way to live. The concerns and values of this present life can so clutter my focus that I can become bogged down and distracted with the incidental and impeded in my progress toward the essential. Oh, how I long to become more like my Master!

Years ago I read a book by the English Puritan preacher, Richard Baxter, The Saint's Everlasting Rest. Baxter was chronically sick, tubercular from his teens and suffering constantly from dyspepsia, kidney stones, headaches, toothaches, swollen limbs, intermittent bleeding at his extremities, and other troubles, and all before the days of pain-killing drugs. Yet he was always energetic, outgoing, and uncomplaining. By the time he was forty-five years old, he had just about evangelized the entire town of Kindderminster (two thousand adults, plus youth), besides writing many books. During the next thirty years, when as an ejected clergyman he was no longer able to hold a pastoral charge, he wrote so much that he now has a niche in history as the most prolific English theologian of all time.

What kept this frail invalid going so single-mindedly and even spectacularly through the years? From his thirtieth year he practiced a habit which he first formed when he thought he was on his deathbed: for something like half an hour each day he would meditate on the life to come, thereby increasing his sense of the glory that awaited him and reinforcing his motivation to use every once of energy and passion that he found within himself to stay fixed on the path of worship, service and holiness towards his goal. Diligent cultivation of hope gave him daily dtermination in disciplined hard work for God, despite the debilitating effect each day of his weak body. He stands for all time as proof that there is present strength to follow Jesus in the present by keeping our focus on the ultimate eternal goal.

My best friend and soul-mate is an inspiration to me in this very practice. She has never ended a prayer without first reflexion and gratitude for the blessed hope that awaits her on the other side of this brief and fleeting life. "We know that when he is revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. " (1 John 3:2).