Last year, my son Gabriel started running track. He’s been more accustomed to Cross Country in the fall and the longer distances, but he decided that he wanted to do something in the spring as well. This led him down the road to some middle-distance running - things like the 800m and the 4x800m.
When I went to the meets, I noticed that the 4x100 athletes practiced the baton hand-off prior to their heats over and over again. They barely lost a stride. But in the longer distance runs, the handoff didn’t seem as important. The form wasn’t as polished.
Perhaps it’s because the shorter distance runners were sprinting their entire legs of the race, so the handoff required more precision. Those races might come down to a few hundredths of a second. But at the longer distances, the runners weren’t sprinting. As each runner ran two laps around the track, the gaps between runners were more significant, so the handoff didn’t require as much precision.
The Bible often uses imagery of athletes competing and runners running. Paul said in 2 Timothy 4:7, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” And in the very next verse he talks about receiving the crown…the prize. However, it’s in the instructions that Paul gives earlier in verses 1-5 that we really get the sense of what he’s trying to communicate:
The race is won and lost in the handoff!
If that’s the case, we need to train. We need to practice. We need to pass it on. We need to be mentored and we need to mentor others. We are called to be prepared to preach, correct, rebuke and encourage, and to do each of these things with patience.
As we close out this short sermon series on the family, we’re going to be looking specifically at how we train up the next generation. For some of us, we may acknowledge that we need someone to mentor us and grow us. For others, we may be reminded that we need to do a better job of passing on our faith to someone else; we need to “discharge our duties to the fullest.”
