The Long Walk

Before Hebrews 12 comes a whole chapter of names: Abel, Noah, Abraham, Moses. And the writer says these people are now "a great cloud of witnesses" surrounding us. The cloud is not a panel of judges in the stands; it is people who finished, testifying that this road can be finished. Then he gives the key word for the race — "perseverance." That word (hypomone) does not mean gritting your teeth through a bad patch; it means endurance under load. It is a marathon word, not a hundred-meter word. Companionship uses the same word: valleys rarely heal by the week, and faith rarely grows by the month. So before the start you have to "lay aside every weight" — and for a companion the most entangling weight is usually the itch for visible results: treating the other person's improvement as your own report card, and quietly deflating when three weeks bring no change.

The race has exactly one focal point: "looking to Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith." The word behind "looking" means to pull your gaze away from everything else and fix it on one place. The writer's prescription is very concrete: when you are tired, don't look at the mileage, look at Jesus. He ran it first — "for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising its shame." From Bethlehem to Golgotha he took thirty-three years, and he did not withdraw in week three. And he is still out on the road: on Easter afternoon he did not go first to a victory celebration; he caught up with two discouraged disciples on the road to Emmaus and walked a whole afternoon with them, letting them talk their disappointment all the way out (Luke 24:15-27). The road you walk with someone is a road he walked with you first. "Consider him, that you don't grow weary" — a companion's endurance is not in willpower. It is in that word: consider.

Galatians 6:9 works off a farmer's calendar: "we will reap in due season if we don't give up." A whole season stands between sowing and reaping, and that is not a malfunction, it is the design — you cannot see October's grain in April, which does not mean nothing is happening in the ground. The truth about discouragement is usually that we have taken the harvest calendar into our own hands. Look back over the four volumes you have walked: in Volume 1 you were known first, and loved; in Volume 2 the gospel took root in you; in Volume 3 you learned to read, and began leading others in reading; in this volume you went back into the inner room to trim your wick, and then picked up the lamp and walked into someone else's valley. Now the graduation ceremony is a plain one: Milestone 10 — four weeks walking with one person in a low place. After four weeks you may well see no "results" at all. That is all right. You sow by the season; God reaps in due time. Walking alongside is your part. Growth was always his.