“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses to the life of faith, let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up. And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us.”

In the venture world we take other people’s money and go to work with it.  In the public markets we also take other’s monies – they are called shareholders.  A small fraction of businesses or any organization doesn’t have more than one person’s capital invested.  So, we are, like it or not, working for someone else and they have lots of high expectations of us.  At the most basic level, they need us to be strong emotionally, intellectually and physically to be able to perform our duties at the highest levels of performance.  To do this last part, we should be behaving in a way that makes us our best and allows us to stick around as long as we can. Researchers published in Circulation Magazine that there are five behaviors that we can practice to live better and longer: eating a healthy diet, not smoking, getting regular physical activity, moderate alcohol consumption and maintaining a normal weight.  Seems simple right? Well not so fast. Less than 2% (that’s right 2%) had all five low-risk behaviors and 33% had two or fewer.  Whoa!  This might even redefine what it is that we are supposed to be doing to work right! Maybe taking good care of ourselves should be in the job description.

Paul tells us that we need to be ready and able to run the race and in order to do so, we must strip off the weights that slow us down.  He is telling us get ourselves in shape and behave right!

Reference: Hebrews 12:1 (New Living Translation)