This is the time of year when our cultural propensity is to look back in reflective retrospect and look forward with renewed resolution. A new year symbolizes an opportunity to close a painful chapter, to start over and hopefully undo or avoid previous mistakes, to move on into something that must be better in some way than what came before. We live in a world where progress is measured in empirical terms…we want to see it, experience it, buy it, or measure it…and we don’t want the process to get there to be too long or arduous. We are enamoured with the instantaneous. Perhaps this is one reason why living a life of faith in an eternal and unseen God seems ludicrous to so many. If you want to gain life, you must lose it. If you want to be first, you must choose to be last. How counter-intuitive to progress is that?!
This one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.
