Gun Lap

 

In track and field, a bell-lap is the last lap of a race during which a bell is rung to signify the start of the final lap. Bell-laps are typically used on longer races on oval tracks, 1500 meters or 1 mile and longer. Gun-lap is another term and method and is defined by my friend Webster as, “the final lap of a race in track signaled by the firing of a gun as the leader begins the lap.” In auto racing, a white flag is waved at each racer as they cross the start/finish line for their final lap. At Golden Gate Porsche Club driver education weekends, the track Starter (or the preferred King God Flag Guy) points at each driver with the index finger and then down to the track as they enter the last lap of their run.

Using some crude math and a 1-Mile race in my analogy, I am in the Gun Lap. My parents passed away just shy of 90-years old, I’m just shy of 70 which is .77777 percent of their ages which puts me in lap four of a four-lap race. The gun has sounded, the bell has wrung, and the King God Flag Guy has pointed to me and the track letting me know I need to finish strong. The whisperings of the Holy Spirit confirm it.

If life is a marathon, and mine has been anything but a sprint, I have either come through the wall or am about to. ‘The Wall’ in long distance running is a point where the body’s glycogen stores have been depleted and the body no longer has the fuel to continue running. One source puts the wall at about 18.64 miles and another simply says, ‘around the 20-mile mark’. Using my .77777 percent figure, I would be at 20.3574 miles in my marathon. There are days I slog through and others are over before I’ve done a lick. I need to find an alternative fuel source if I want to finish my marathon well.

Hebrews 12: 1-2a: ¹Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. ^2aLet us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith (an alternative fuel source if ever there was one).

Years ago, maybe a lifetime gone by, my dad gave me a copy of the book, Finishing Well by Bob Buford. The men’s group Dad met with in Grants Pass, Oregon was going through the book and he wanted me to keep pace with them. If I was there on a Thursday during a visit, I would go with him. Good men all around the table. I’ve regretted not keeping pace and engaging with him through this study and have begun reading it on my own to get myself back in the race.

What do I mean when I say, “finish well”? Ken Blanchard, Coauthor of The Servant Leader and The One Minute Manager, wrote the forward to Buford’s book. In his forward, he talks about asking people, “Would you like the world to be a better place for your having been here?” “What’s your plan?” Goodness yes. As a Christian, oh God yes but what does this mean? I imagine that a large portion of finishing well is finding and doing the Will of the Father. On September 6, 2022, I published a post entitled Off the Bench. That was the start of me finding my answer to what finishing well means.

1/4 Mile Track Layout

There is a problem with all my math and analogies – I don’t know and can’t know where I am is this last lap. Look at the diagram above. Have I just entered the Clubhouse Turn? Am I coming out at the ¾ Pole? Am I cruising the backstretch, diving into the Far Turn, or making my last sprint down the Homestretch? How do I know if I have even one stride left?

James 4: 13-15: ¹³Now Listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” ¹⁴Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. ¹⁵Intead, you ought to say, “if it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”

My first step in finishing well is to determine to do so. This is followed closely by figuring out what it will look like for me. Have I hit the wall? If so, I must find the supernatural source of energy to replace everything I’ve exhausted. I must fix my eyes on Jesus who is not only the author and perfector of my faith but is the tape at the finish line. To finish well I need to exhaust everything that is me, there is no need for it once the finish line is crossed.

One of the greatest depictions of finishing well is a scene from Chariots of Fire. Eric Liddell, played by Ian Charleson, is running “to the Glory of God” and has trained for the 100-meter sprint but must withdraw because of the race is being held on a Sunday, the Lord’s Day. He was given a spot in the 400-meter race, a much longer race by far and demands pacing. In the Clubhouse Turn he is knocked to the ground but gets up to finish and win the race. Upon hitting the tape, he collapses and eventually must be carried off the field by friends. This is finishing well. If you’ve a mind to, catch the YouTube clip from the link below.

Get up and finish the race from Chariots of Fire: Get up and finish the race 

Can I get up when knocked down and how then can I truly finish well? By doing my very best to make every stride glorify God, take every breath in the knowledge that Jesus has authored the finish.

Go now, train for your race, practice finishing well each day.

In His grip,

jerry

Psst...Trust Me

  

She'll run like a charm, trust me.

Psst…Trust Me

Early in 2021, I was one of nine individuals who were asked and accepted a nomination to be elected to a select committee of the La Crescenta Presbyterian Church, our home church. We were elected unanimously by the congregation without receiving nominations from the floor, volunteers from those present, and without debate. Apparently, no one else was clamoring to be on the Pastor Nominating Committee (PNC) charged with finding the replacement for our longtime and beloved pastor who had announced his and his wife’s intention to move on to a new call, this one in the missionary field, a place where their hearts lay as well as the heart of the congregation.

NCAA Basketball fans will get this analogy without blinking and most will understand it. Imagine taking over for Coach John Wooden (Wizard of Westwood) upon his retirement as the UCLA Men’s Basketball coach. It took Coach Wooden several years to build his program to the point where they won 10 NCAA championships over a 12-year period, with a string of seven in a row. Only one other college program has more than seven in their history - Kentucky has eight over a 64-year period. How do you follow an act like that? How do you find a person to establish a culture of excellence of their own when expectations run so high? No wonder we didn’t have a line out the door of smiling people eager for the task of finding the next pastor.

I should not have said yes. My parents had passed away ten weeks apart only two or three months previous, I was steeped in managing their estate based in Oregon, and due to the pandemic, hadn’t been able to mourn properly or celebrate their life with family and friends, and I was a wreck. I had no right to nod my head and accept this blessing but God was at work and I desperately needed to see His hand in action, to be met by Him in ways as he so often has over my life. I cannot say that I did not look back once I put my hand to the plow (see Luke 9:62). I was days away from bowing out but knew one of us needed to exit the task more than I as her husband was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. Even though I knew I was not fit for this service, I knew this – that God’s Grace is sufficient.

In somewhat typical fashion for our church, we didn’t go strictly by the book for this process. If you know much about Presbyterians, you should know we have a book for anything we do. Our outgoing pastor stayed on in an interim capacity while the search went on and our committee was tasked to complete our Mission Information Form (MIF) which is typically done by a separate and specific committee before handing the work over to the PNC.

I struggled here to find the right word for our task, to call it a journey is to belittle what we went through. Journeys are simply defined as ‘A going from one place to another usually of some distance’. I had to scroll down the list of related words my friend Webster was giving me and rejected hop, jaunt, cruise, walkabout to settle on quest, closely followed by odyssey, hike, slog and tramp. We did all those things in our search for the person called by God from time immemorial to be our next pastor.

Make no mistake about this, we knew what we were called to and what was placed in our hands – a Sacred Trust. To a person, we approached our job as a Sacred Trust, entrusted by our congregation to find someone to lead us, guide us deeper into discipleship, closer to Jesus and we were trusted by Jesus to find his Will. We opened every meeting (at least weekly for two years plus interviews and special weekends) with scripture and prayer. Each of us committed ourselves to prayer and fasting in our own fashion. We slogged, trodged (sic), and waded our way through close to 100 Pastor Information Forms (PIFs), dozens of interviews, four neutral pulpit weekends, two, yes two invitations to the call, and one Candidating Weekend that culminated in the vote of the congregation with the landslide ‘Yes’ result. Praise God!

As an aside, let me ask you a quick rhetorical question here, would you have clicked on the link if I correctly named this post A Sacred Trust? Or would you have read this far? Rhetoric aside, we all have a sacred trust to complete.

We laughed, cried, cajoled, rolled our eyes, and wondered at God’s wisdom to put us in such a place. We were humbled by the enormity of the task, heartened by the quality of men and women we interviewed, and amazed at the wisdom of each of the other people on our committee. We were likely sacrilegious from time to time. My suggestion to use my ‘Daily Decision’ app to make the choice from our short list comes to mind. Hey, the 11 Apostles cast lots to find Judas’ replacement, didn’t they? And they’d been in Jesus’ presence for three and half years. Fortunately, nobody took me seriously.

Even with all that going on, the Sacred Trust and Task proceeded as God willed. My choice of the photo I used to draw you in is apt. We were not looking for a shiny new pastor right off the Seminary showroom floor. We knew, or at least trusted, that the used model wouldn’t be a clunker nobody else wanted. The reality is, we didn’t know what make or model we would find or how many miles they had traveled. We placed our own sacred trust in God chiming our spiritual bells and letting us know which one to call.

Our congregation showed us grace, patience, and unwavering support. We would not have succeeded without it. Our Presbytery’s Committee on Ministry (COM) assigned us a pastor to support and guide us on our quest, a man who we could easily have picked to pastor the church. This man and his wife, also an ordained pastor, then came alongside the congregation to take over as interim pastor and have brought us through a period of healing and focused intention to prepare the way for our new pastor. As our interim pastor, his own Sacred Trust, he has made big asks of our PNC, the individuals on the committee and in the congregation, and the entire congregation. We needed the wake-up call to be intentional in our desire for God’s Will with this new direction.

Our trust was rewarded. The trust of the congregation was rewarded. The Sacred Trust has been fulfilled and our new pastor will be in our pulpit on July 2.

Thank you for reading and sharing a little bit of what our quest was like, our Sacred Trust. Now, go out and find a spiritual walkabout of your own, a Sacred Trust you can undertake. Our Lord will be by your side and the value is measureless.

In His grip,

jerry