“Don’t you realize that in a race everyone runs, but only one person gets the prize? So run to win!”

Yesterday, 48,998 people went to a starting line of a race that they would lose.  In fact, only about 100 of the 50,000 would start with any thought that they could even get close to winning.  The rest knew from the beginning that they weren’t racing to win. It’s the story of every New York City Marathon.  But, yet all of those people who aren’t going to win, they still train as hard as they can and also give everything they have when they are out there on the course.  How do I know this? Because, I have raced that distance eight times in my life and never in a moment did I dream or think that I could win anything, not even  my age group.  But, that didn’t make any of the races/runs any less important to push myself to the best I could do.  It’s actually too bad that we don’t think of our careers more like this. Instead of striving for one spot and then getting disappointed and leaving a company or losing time and progress to frustration.  What if we thought of our careers as a race to be run, not to win, but to do our best?

The Apostle Paul, an athlete, maybe even a runner, tells us that only one runs to gain the trophy or the prize, but we can still run to win.  Paul was telling us that the race of life is one where the winning is in the how we live, not in the prizes we might collect along the way.  But, Paul was also telling us that there is a bigger prize in the eternity we will have with Jesus.  So, the race is to be run to our best ability, no matter the obstacles in front of us today!

Reference:  1 Corinthians 9:24 (New Living Translation)