When we first started meeting in the new building, I preached on the dangers of anticlimax, for there is usually a ‘low’ that follows any ‘high’ and we can be in danger of thinking that there is something wrong if we aren’t always feeling on top form.
Many of you know that I have been in training for the Swimathon event, a sponsored swim to raise money for Marie Curie Cancer Care (and many thanks to all of you who have sponsored me for this!) Today was the actual sponsored swim and I managed the 5 km swim I had set out to achieve. I even have the medal to prove it! But funnily enough, rather than feeling any great sense of achievement, I felt a strange sense of anticlimax at the end of it. “Is that it?” perhaps best sums up my feelings. All those weeks of training, all that extra mental toughness in true Thomas the Tank Engine style (‘I think I can, I think I can’), all that imagining and hoping and wondering… all gone. I’ve done it. And instead of feeling elated or any great sense of achievement, I just think ‘Now what?’
Life can be like that more often than we like to admit. Garry has just bought a new motorbike. He’s been dreaming of this moment for months and months and has talked of little else for the past few weeks. This week he’s been like a child waiting for Christmas! But at times maybe the anticipation and the saving up and the waiting and hoping are more exciting than the reality. When we’ve got what we want, sometimes we don’t want it any more…! (Not true of Garry, I hasten to add!)
The human heart is restless, always wanting more. If we think things will satisfy us, there’s always something bigger, better, shinier out there to tempt our hearts and lead us astray. We need to learn patience and contentment and the joy, perhaps, of perseverance.
Hebrews 12 tells us to run with perseverance, “fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” (Heb 12:2) We need to have that long-term vision and the stickability that will not depend on the highs and lows of feeling or mood or circumstances but on the reality of God’s word. Paul tells us in Romans 8 “But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” May we learn to wait patiently for what we do not yet have and may we be thankful for all we do have, not moving on restlessly to the next quest for something new, but learning contentment in God.