“The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.” (Ecclesiastes 9:11)

 

These words have come back to my mind many, many times since July 26, 2018. I’ve seen this sentence multiple times over my life while reading the Bible, and I thought I understood it.

Today, those words mean much more to me than ever before.

Trial By Fire

On that Thursday in July, a wildfire of historic ferocity swept into the western part of Redding, California, where I live. Firefighters moved swiftly, battled fiercely, but the blaze won the day. Weather, dry conditions, and challenging terrain sided with the fire. The flames destroyed more than a thousand homes, claimed six lives, and displaced tens of thousands of people, including my family.

During the following days, fire crews eventually gained ground, staring down an incredible force of nature. Defeating a phenomenon like this fire is a long and difficult task, but I have no doubt they will prevail.

As I look at the fire maps, especially those showing devastated neighborhoods in which the fight was close and personal, I am both awed and grateful to the people who risked their lives to save others and protect their property.

I cannot overstate the magnitude of the effort, courage, and resolve of firefighters and all those that support them.

Since I don’t fight fires, I followed the events from a distance, and saw a different side of the disaster. And what I saw taught me what the line from Ecclesiastes really means, “the race is not to the swift.” I saw both friends and strangers open their doors in the dead of night to refugees seeking shelter. For my own church congregation, texts and emails and phone calls flew throughout that day and the following days ensuring people were housed, safe, accounted for, clothed and fed. Many others did the same.

The entire community of Redding, one hundred thousand people of which forty thousand were homeless for days, opened their arms and their hearts. Shelters housed hundreds, donations of food, clothing and other necessities poured in. People sacrificed their own time and their own means to help.

And from that I understood.

The Race and the Battle

The race is not won by the swiftest runner because this race is not about winners. It is about finishers.

The race refers to life itself, our lives. Life does not have winners and losers, it has finishers. We are all destined for the finish line, for some it comes sooner than for others, but no matter who it is, the end will come. And how we finish our life matters a lot. Not the manner of our passing, but who we have become by the time we get there.

I think an excellent illustration of what I mean occurred in 2014 during a college softball game. The full details are available here, and this video shows the event. This story was not about winning, it was about becoming. This is how we put the finishing touches on who we are.

The two young women carrying their opponent to home plate exemplify what Ecclesiastes means by the “race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.”

What does it take to become a person like this?

You and I do not fight a physical battle. Instead, we fight an inner battle against selfishness, ego, and anger. The battle goes not to the strong but to the meek and humble of heart. We win not by slaying a dragon but by defeating our own weaknesses.

Ernest Hemingway wrote in For Whom the Bell Tolls, “for what are we born if not to aid one another?” I wrote about this in an article about Charlotte’s Web, and from that post I wanted to repeat this quote, one of my favorites:

“A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.”

We Go Together

Lifting seems like such an excellent verb to describe what we should do in life. Especially because when we lift someone else, during their difficult time or tragedy, it lifts us as well. Selflessness lifts our heart and our soul. As Charlotte the spider said, “anyone’s life can stand a little of that.”

Since life is not a race, whether we are swift or slow is actually not important. And by taking time to lift others, to take others with us, to help them along, we might feel like we are wasting time and not really moving forward.

My own belief is that not only do we need to help others to be happy in life, we also need to be helped.

No one goes alone because no one can go alone. We are not strong enough by ourselves to make it through life.

Each life has seasons, some of prosperity and some of need. In our own necessity, we often look around and wonder when help will come.

But far more important is what we do during our seasons of prosperity. Do we look around for those we could help?

“No man is an island,” John Donne wrote. “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”

We are part of a great collection of people, and we must go together.

Who Goes With You?

For me, this last question is critical. If we accept that life requires living outside of ourselves, caring about others, we will eventually wonder who we should help and how. C. S. Lewis said that giving should hurt. What we give should be something important to us, not trivial.

Giving a little of something we have a lot of is not as meaningful as giving from what we have little of. Giving what is most valuable to us means the most.

In the New Testament, Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan. This video is a modern rendition of that old story:

I love this video because it shows what it means to truly lift another person. In the context of swift and strong, this video shows that lifting another does not meet our definition of being the fastest. Instead, it shows that we might risk our own comfort, our own wealth, our own destination in order to help someone else.

But that is the whole point. In doing that, we win the battle. The strength to defeat selfishness comes through selfless acts. We learn to control our ego by increasing our empathy, which comes by willingly sharing in another person’s trial. And we can replace anger and hate with meekness and happiness by giving of ourselves, our time and our wealth.

The story of the Good Samaritan also shows us one other truth. Helping only our friends and family, while good, is not enough. It is easy to help those we love. We also need to stretch ourselves and help those who we don’t know, even possibly those who might not even like us. Maybe we might even help someone who refused to help us during our own season of want.

And then, if we can do that, we can change our own heart. We can be finishers.

 

 

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Island Photo credit: armandogalonso.com on Visual hunt / CC BY-NC

Cover Photo and final photo credit: on VisualHunt