in the long run

well, it's Saturday night (actually Sunday morning) and I've not posted since Thursday. Although, I spent the entire day yesterday en route (I got up at 4:30a to make it to the airport, and arrived home around 10p), it is still a bit odd to have a blank day on the blog considering all I've experienced this week. Truth is, huge things are playing in my head, they just don't find themselves made into words yet. This evening, I've sat and pondered and still nothing to sum anything up. The conversations this week ran the gamut of topics, from immediate day-to-day appenticeship stuff, to huge, decade long stuff that seems impossible to realize.
In one conversation, Brian McLaren was talking about some things to which someone responded, is this something that can happen in the church as we know it, or is this a change that would have to take place over decades? The response was one that caused great contemplation on my part.
There are some areas of my life in which I have unfathomable stamina. There are things that I've been at for many years seeing only incremental progress. I spent 10 years in graduate school trying to become the best guitarist I could be, but many things in my life don't come about because I don't want to wait on them. Granted, these are often only tiny insignificant things, but so often my procrastinating reasoning makes no sense at all. I'll want a book and put off ordering it because it will take so long to get here. Of course, when I finally order it, it comes a week or two later than it originally would have. To have to wait for something so often douses my desire for it. Can't I just issue a decree or proclamation and have everything immediately become the way it ought to be, or the way I want it? The answer? NO!
This has caused me to look back for encouragement in the things that have happened because I've stayed the course. Even Paul warned us that this was what it was going to take. We press on toward the mark of the high calling. Imagine the distance runner.

You can do a lot in a lifetime
If you don't burn out too fast
You can make the most of the distance
First you need endurance
First you've got to last...

It's the test of ultimate will, the heartbreak climb uphill. The road ahead is sometimes very discouraging. Muscles burn, sweat gets in your eyes, obstacles are thrown in your path. One needs to be reminded of what has been accomplished through perseverance. These are the stories that encourage us. Often we know the stories - we just need to be reminded. McLaren's response to the question was, "what if it were 1840 - would you rather be on the side of the abolitionists, or not?" I know I'd rather be on the right side, though we know that it took another quarter century for things to be righted, and in 1840, there was surely no encouragement that things would ever change. A way of life meant the preservation of a great wrong. But perseverance beat out preservation.
Often the very things that need to be changed are the current location of a marathon of movement. The course has been altered or lost, and it's like changing the direction of a train with so much forward momentum on a rail. But it can be done. It can be done.