January 2002

Philippians 3:13-16

How many of us are fully engaged in life? How many of us are living in the moment, staying attuned to the wonder of daily experience? How many of us are using a positive attitude to overcome life's challenges?

In other words, how many of us are really living? How many of us are fully alive? Those questions are difficult, but I can suggest one effective way to answer them? If you're making progress in your life, you are really alive.

Think for a moment about the biggest problem you are facing today. Then try to recall the biggest problem you were facing one year ago at this time. If both problems are the same, you are probably not making enough headway in your life. You are not living life fully.

We often don't like to evaluate how much progress we are making. It's uncomfortable. It is much easier to point a finger at someone else and say, "That person over there, he's not growing. He's not moving ahead with his life."

We're true experts at discerning other people's shortcomings. I know that I am very, very good at it. And I have to admit, I often took on just that judgmental role with my late brother, who had health problems through much of his adult life. He was overweight. He had diabetes and some heart problems. When I would go to dinner with him, he would often order a steak and french fries. I would look at him and say, "Why are you doing this? Why don't you take better care of yourself? Why don't you change your life?"

I became a terrible nag. And do you know, all my criticism didn't change him at all? Like many people, I believed that it should be easy for other people to change. Yet when I tried to change something about myself, I found that terribly hard. Over a period of five or six years, I was keenly aware that I needed to lose fifteen pounds. The problem was on my mind morning, afternoon and night. I didn't like myself because of it. The weight bothered me physically and it was detrimental to my health. My clothes were too tight. There finally came a day when I realized I had to reserve five extra minutes in the morning so I could work the top button of my shirt into place.

I then made a half-hearted attempt to lose weight and discovered that the weight-loss tactics that had worked for me ten years earlier didn't work any more. My metabolism had changed, which became my excuse for not losing weight. The day I told my cardiologist this rationalization, he was magnificently uncompassionate. He looked at me and said, "Arthur, eat fewer calories and you will lose the weight." Since then, I've lost thirteen of the fifteen pounds I need to get rid of.

What am I saying? I am saying that it is very difficult to turn that corner and get going on the changes we must make. Yet we also know that people do change. Miracles do happen in people's lives, but how do they happen?

When I consider such questions, I often think of Saint Paul who we know had a brilliant mind. If they had IQ tests in his day, his IQ would have gone off the chart. We're very fortunate to have so many of his letters, which record so much of his journey. These letters illustrate how he overcame problems in his life, and how he got his power and strength.

Let me paraphrase something Paul wrote in his letter to the Philippians...

This one thing I do. I forget what lies in the past and I stretch and strain forward to what lies ahead. I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call in Jesus Christ.

What was Paul saying? He said, in essence, "I have found something that works. I turn my back on the past, which can drag me down and prevent me from moving ahead. I stretch and strain toward the future." Notice that Paul talked about the effort of stretching forward ("I press on?"). He wanted to tell people that progress is difficult.

I think you will agree with me that the twelve-step program is one of the most ingenious inventions of our time - a format that has helped countless people make important changes in their lives. And what is the first step in such programs? It's an easy step, yet difficult. You have to say, "I have a problem." In the second step, you must say, "I am powerless over this problem; it is bigger than I am." And in the third step, you must say, "There is a divine source of help which I call God. I turn my will and my life over to God."

In these three steps, we see some of the keys to transforming a life. It's about straining toward what lies ahead, realizing that you can't do it alone, and inviting God's magnificent power to help.

We see change at work in many lives. Some of you know Dr. Harry Moody's name. In his extraordinary book The Five Stages of the Soul, he writes that when he was a young man, he spent time at a Roman Catholic retreat center in Northern California. It was an odd thing for him to do, because he'd been brought up a strict Lutheran.

On the second day at the retreat, he met a nun named Sister Anne Marie. She was in her late sixties. He told her that he felt he was on a journey with his life. She replied that she, too, had been searching for something since childhood.

She said, "When I was a little girl, I searched for the affection and the approval of my parents. Then when I got to school, I searched for good grades so I would be liked by everybody. When I grew up, I searched for a husband and a career. I got married. I couldn't have children, so I searched for a way to adopt a child."

Then she said, "I came into this nunnery when I was thirty-four years old, after my husband and son had been killed in a boating accident. After that tragedy, I devoted my life to prayer and good works. I'm now sixty-eight years old and I'm still on a search."

Harry Moody said it was very helpful to him, as a young man, to hear an older person, far along in her journey, say she had never stopped searching.

And then she said these words, which made a deep impression on him: "Both the Scriptures and our Lord Jesus have promised us that we always will find an answer to our search." And then she quoted from the Sermon on the Mount:

Seek and you will find.

She also said, "As I got older, I stopped looking for answers in the material world, because the material world contains only things that will pass from sight. The difference in my life began when I began to search for that one permanent thing in the universe - when I began my search for God."

She was telling the young man to keep seeking. She was saying that if he would keep pressing ahead, there was a spiritual guarantee that the answer he was seeking would come.

Maybe you know this story about a young boy, sixteen years old, who had just gotten his driver's license. Like all young people with new licenses, he sensed a whole new world opening up before him. He went to his father, who happened to be a minister, and said "Dad, I want to talk to you about using the car."

The father said, "Sit down and let's have a conversation about this. You don't think you can use the car just because you have a license?"

"Oh yes, I can."

The kid pressed him a little bit, but didn't get very far. Then the father said, "I'll make a deal with you. You can use the car if you do three things. First, bring up your grades. Second, study the Bible more. And third, cut your hair."

So the son studied hard and when his next report card arrived home, he was much improved. He also told his father that he had been very diligent in his study of Scripture. He knew a lot more about the Bible.

The father said, "Yes, I'm impressed by that. But you haven't cut your hair."

The boy said, "Well, Dad, in the Bible I found out that Samson had long hair, Moses had long hair and Jesus had long hair."

And the father said, "Yes, they did, but they also walked everywhere they went."

This young man was learning that in order to be happy, he needed to keep pressing on.

I have one other thought about pressing on with the search. As you keep searching for answers, it is essential to keep on expecting that they will come. Expect something wonderful to happen. Expect tomorrow to be better than today. Expectation makes great things much more likely to happen.

My friend Richard Lewis recently sent this story that serves as a wonderful parable to illustrate just that point. It seems that a woman who had been ill went to see her doctor. He told her she had only about three months to live, and that she should get her affairs in order. So she got her material and financial decisions made; then she called her minister.

"I'd like to plan my funeral with you," she said. She then told him about the Scriptures she wanted read, the hymns that she wanted sung and the dress she wanted to be buried in. She also said she wanted to be buried with her favorite Bible. The minister agreed to all these things.

But then she said, "I have one more request. I'd like to be buried with a fork in my right hand."

"A fork in your right hand? What is that about?" he asked.

"In my long life, I attended many dinners at church. Every time people were cleaning the table, they would say, 'Keep your fork.' So I always knew that keeping a fork meant that something better was about to happen. I was always rewarded with chocolate pie or deep-dish apple pie."

"But," she said to the minister, "I don't want you to tell anybody why I have a fork until you give my funeral sermon."

The day of her funeral finally did come. She was laid out in her favorite dress, holding her favorite Bible, with a fork in her right hand. And people were buzzing around and asking, "What is that all about? What is that all about?"

In his sermon, the minister told the story about how she knew that the best was yet to come, and that holding a fork had become her personal symbol for that idea. The minister told the congregation that he, too, wanted to be buried holding a fork. It was a matter of faith.

So how do we keep growing? How do we keep stretching? How do we keep getting beyond where we are now, to a better place? I would like to suggest two things. First, as St. Paul said to the Philippians, keep pressing on. Second, always go through life expecting something better to happen. Let us pray.

Lord, You give us the gift of life and You give us challenges. You make the journey one of testing after testing, learning after learning. Lord, give us the ingredients for living. Give us the dynamic and the faith to keep pressing on. Give us the gift of hope, so that we expect something better to happen. We know it will happen, because You love us. In Christ's name we ask. AMEN