Enduring

Alexander George writes in Popular Mechanics:

Ready for the one genius tip that will make you a better winter driver? Here it is: Look where you want to go. Yep—that’s it. It’s so simple, and so effective, that every pro driver does it. But it’s so unintuitive that you have to practice to get it right.

That’s because our very reasonable instinct is to instead focus on where we don’t want to go. When the most urgent threat to your bodily safety and insurance premium is the car ahead of you or a guardrail, you watch that thing. But when you’re at speed, you involuntarily direct yourself towards wherever you’re focused. It’s formally known as target fixation, a term you’ll see in literature for fighter pilots and motorcycle racers.

Rather than watch the bumper of the car you’re following on the highway, or a guardrail between you and steep cliff, look further in time. Fix your eyes on the middle of your lane, at the spot you want to be several seconds later, even if that means ignoring the car in front of you. Your peripheral vision will still catch any unexpected braking or road debris.

It took me a full day at a winter driving school to believe. On a track made of snow and ice, I drove a Lexus LX into a turn with too much speed and deliberately lost traction. Most runs, the rear end would fishtail, sometimes turning me completely around. A few times, usually after the instructor disabled the stability control and ABS, I’d end up sliding almost perpendicular to the direction I was pointing. Even in a controlled environment, it’s terrifying.

The instructor correctly pointed out that I was looking right at the wall of snow I wanted to not hit. “Look where you want to go,” he said, and fixed almost everything I was doing wrong.

I haven’t found any activity where this doesn’t help — surfing, cycling, skiing. Try it the next time you’re out on the road.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In the same way, when faced with a temptation, instead of always looking at the temptation, bad habit, or trouble that you want to avoid, “look at Jesus” (Heb. 12:2). Fixing your eyes on our Savior and focusing on your relationship with him will get you safely through whatever trouble, temptation, or worry is troubling you.

There's been a lot of research about stress and here's the bad news: it's really bad for your body and your brain. Dr. Rajita Sinha imaged the brains of 100 participants and found that profoundly stressful events (not the normal, day-to-day kinds of stress) can actually shrink the part of your brain called the prefrontal cortex.

In addition, she and her team found that it’s not individual traumatic events that have the most impact, but the cumulative effect of a lifetime’s worth of stress that might cause the most dramatic changes in brain volume.

That area of the brain helps manage our emotions, impulse control, and personal interactions. Smaller brain volumes in these centers have also been linked to depression and other mood disorders such as anxiety.

Dr. Sinha said, “The brain is plastic, and there are ways to bring back and perhaps reverse some of the effects of stress and rescue the brain somewhat.” Relieving stress through exercise or meditation is an important way to diffuse some of the potentially harmful effects it can have on the brain. Maintaining strong social and emotional relationships can also help, to provide perspective on events of experiences that may be too overwhelming to handle on your own.

So, these overstressed individuals may not be able to "just get over it." They may need large amounts of love, patience, and prayer from their church community.

Godfrey Barnsley was one of the wealthiest men in the world in the early 1800s. He directed a shipping empire that sailed the world sea’s and transported 60% of the South’s cotton to his native England. He was well respected all over the world.

Barnsley decided to build a luxurious and magnificent home for his wife, Julia. He purchased 400 acres of land in the wilderness of northwest Georgia and created a vast estate and gardens. Since his wealth was so immense, he shipped in hundreds of rare trees and shrubs—ancient Cedars from Lebanon and other bushes from around the world. He chose handcrafted windows with sterling silver latches, marble from Italy and France, and priceless furnishings from the four corners of the world. It was one of the most exquisite antebellum estates east of the Mississippi river.

Unfortunately, his wife passed away before the home was completed in 1848, but several generations of the family lived at this estate until 1942. However, by the 1980s, the home and grounds were vacant and falling into ruins. In 1988, the property was purchased by an investor who developed it into the upscale resort it is today. If you go to Barnsley resort, all that remains of Godfrey Barnsley’s investment is a pile of rocks, known as the “Manor House Ruins.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

When your time on earth is finished, which legacy would you prefer: People impacted by how you lived your life and utilized your money, or a mound of rocks?

Jon Krakauer cleared the ice from his oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and straddled the summit of Mount Everest. It was 1:17 PM on May 10th, 1996. Krakauer, an accomplished climber and journalist, had not slept in 57 hours. He had not eaten much more than a bowl of ramen soup and a handful of peanut M&M's in three days. Still, he had reached the top of the Earth's tallest peak—29,028 feet. In his oxygen deprived stupor, he had no way of knowing that storm clouds forming below would turn into a vicious blizzard that would claim the lives of five fellow climbers. Yet he knew his adventure was hardly finished.

In his book Into Thin Air, Krakauer describes what he felt:

Reaching the top of Everest is supposed to trigger a surge of intense elation; against long odds, after all, I had just attained a goal I'd coveted since childhood. But the summit was really only the halfway point. Any impulse I might have felt towards self-congratulation was extinguished by the overwhelming apprehension about the long, dangerous descent that lay ahead.

In a recent issue of Runner's World, Jess Movold shared how she lost her passion to press on:

Tempo runs scare me. Those long, hard, sustained efforts always look impossible when I see them on paper. Doubt creeps in. I remember one run in particular—I saw it on my plan and immediately began creating a laundry list of excuses as to why this was simply just not going to work, why I wasn’t fit enough, why I wouldn’t finish, why I would fail. Before I even laced up my shoes, I’d already convinced myself I couldn’t do this. Instead of using the warmup to find my groove, prepare for success, and get excited to make the best of it, I adopted a loser’s mindset, revisited my list of excuses, and fell further into a bad attitude.

The problem, I realized, was that I treated my entire training plan like a tempo run—hard, fast, strict. In a tempo run, if you don’t hit your pace early, it’s nearly impossible to catch up. In my training plan, I felt like if I didn’t hit a workout early, I wouldn’t be able to catch up.

How did she fix this problem? She started treating her workout collectively like a long run:

I love long runs … settling into a relaxed pace, enjoying the route, and focusing on only one goal—finishing. I love that I can have a bad mile in the middle and still end strong.

Now, when I set a new goal, I have what I call “the long-run mindset.” I find success and value in my training because I’m not desperate for immediate results like I have been. I care more about the big picture and my long-term goals as a runner. I have shifted my attitude to think bigger than short-term outcomes and work toward lifelong success.

Later, Movold offers this advice:

In training as a whole, your “why” will likely be more meaningful but just as important. What are you running toward? Figure out the reason for the miles, and they become easier.

When Sarah Sallon moved back home to Israel, to her job at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, she went looking for medicinal plants which had helped her during a previous illness. And she found lots of them. But she also heard about ancient medicinal plants that had disappeared.

She said, “They're just historical ghosts. Like the famous date plantations along the Dead Sea, 2,000 years ago—described by Pliny; described by Josephus, the first-century historian. They're not there anymore. They just vanished!”

But Sallon realized that seeds from those trees still existed. They'd been recovered from archaeological sites. So, she went to the archaeologists and proposed planting some of those seeds, to see if they'd grow again. It didn't go well at first. She said, “They thought I was mad! They didn't think that this was even conceivable.”

But she kept pushing, and eventually persuaded a few of them to provide some seeds to try this. More than a decade ago, she planted some of these ancient palm seeds. Six weeks later, little green shoots appeared!

Sallon and her colleagues recently announced in the journal Science Advances that they'd grown another six trees from some of those ancient seeds. No wonder God’s Word is likened unto an imperishable seed.

In the game of basketball, a player who is fouled often has the chance to shoot a free throw worth one point. It should be one of the easiest plays in sports. It's a direct, unguarded shot at the basket and the conditions are exactly the same every single time.

Yet for decades, elite players have only averaged between 70 and 75 percent from the foul line. For the past 20 years, Larry Silverberg, an engineer at North Carolina State University, has studied the physics of the free throw. His findings show that a successful free throw has four parameters: the speed at which you release the ball, how straight you shoot it, the angle, and the amount of backspin.

Surprisingly, Silverberg says there's very little separating the best from the average free throw shooters. Average shooters are often plenty consistent—they're just consistent at the wrong things. That's actually good news because it suggests that sharpshooters are made, not born. Making free throws has little to do with inborn talent or athleticism, and almost everything to do with hard work.

That might explain why the best free throw shooter on earth (at least in practice settings) isn't a pro basketball player, but Bob Fisher, a 62-year-old soil-conservation technician from Kansas. By his own admission, Fisher is no standout athlete. "I'm like a million guys," he says. "I played high school basketball, and I played recreationally till I was 44." A few years later, in his early 50s, he started practicing free throws every day at his local gym. Within a couple of months he was consistently sinking more than 100 shots in a row. Fisher says it’s all about preparation and practice.

Possible Preaching Angles: Spiritual Disciplines; Growth; Spiritual Growth – In the same way, growing as a Christian is not just available for the super-saints. It’s a matter of consistent engagement with and practice of spiritual disciplines.

On January 14, 2015, after nearly three weeks of exhausting and relentless climbing, Kevin Jorgeson and Tommy Caldwell reached the top of the El Capitan rock formation in Yosemite National Park. They made history as the first people to free climb the sheer Dawn Wall—climbing without aids, using ropes only to secure themselves when they inevitably and repeatedly fell. At three thousand feet high and composed of thirty-two sections—some of which are among the hardest climbs in the world all by themselves—the Dawn Wall had long been considered an impossible endeavor among the mountaineering community.

For nineteen days Jorgeson and Caldwell slept between climbing sessions in tents suspended hundreds of feet into the air. They repeated the same moves over and over as they tried to conquer the Dawn Wall's different sections. Again and again they sliced their hands and fingers open on the razor-sharp rock, making advances of only a few inches. Scaling the imposing Dawn Wall had been Caldwell and Jorgeson's goal for a long time, and they had spent eight years preparing for it. Using social media to communicate, they continually updated their progress. The world watched and waited with bated breath as they conquered this colossal rock face.

Part of the reason the story got so much attention, Jorgeson guessed, is that people can relate to elements of the journey. "It's a big dream, it requires teamwork and determination and commitment," said Jorgeson. "And those aren't climbing-specific attributes. Those are common to everybody, whether you're trying to write a book or climb a rock." At one point, when he was suffering, Caldwell sent out a message saying: "Razor sharp holds ripped both the tape and the skin right off my fingers. As disappointing as this is, I'm learning new levels of patience, perseverance and desire. I'm not giving up. I will rest. I will try again. I will succeed." The specific objective is irrelevant, he said, but both climbers hope that their experience might inspire others to ask themselves: "What's my Dawn Wall?"

In the original fairy tale version of The Wizard of Oz, the Tin Woodman had once been a real man who was in love with a beautiful maiden and dreamed of marrying her. The witch hated their love, so she cast a spell on him so that one by one his limbs had to be replaced with artificial tin limbs. The tin limbs allowed him to work like a machine. So with a heart of love for his maiden and arms that never tired, he seemed destined to win over the witch's spell.

But the Tin Man said, "I thought I had beaten the Wicked Witch then, and I worked harder than ever; but I little knew how cruel my enemy could be." The Wicked Witch made Tin Man's axe slip and cut himself in half, and though a tinner was able to fasten him back together again, alas, he had no heart … so that I lost all my love for the girl, and did not care whether I married her or not."

Most of you know the rest of the story: caught in a rainstorm, the Tin Man began to rust, remaining in that spot until Dorothy came all the way from Kansas to rescue him and begin his journey to Oz. In the book by Frank Baum, the Tin Man tells Dorothy, "During the year I stood there I had time to think that the greatest loss I had known was the loss of my heart. While I was in love I was the happiest man on earth; but no one can love who has not a heart, and so I am resolved to ask the Oz to give me one."

Possible Preaching Angles: John Eldredge comments, "Notice there was a man who was once real and alive and in love. But after a series of blows, his humanity was reduced to efficiency. He became a sort of machine—a hollow man." Life has a way of doing the same thing to us. We, too, have suffered a series of blows. And, as a result, we may still go through the motions of life—busy, productive, efficient, and religious—but we've lost our heart. But the risen Christ can renew our hearts with his hope.

A 12-year-old girl in New York City is being hailed for her bravery in a recent argument with a male classmate that almost turned violent. The dispute? The boy asked for one of her McDonald's chicken nuggets-but she refused. The police report says that after being denied once, the boy then followed the girl into a nearby subway station, pulled out a gun, and pointed the weapon at her head. Incredibly, reports say that the girl slapped the boy's hand away, told him to leave her alone, and went about the rest of her day. Police found and appropriately charged the boy for juvenile attempted robbery, and the chicken-nugget-loving girl of New York City quickly become an internet sensation. You go, girl.

Potential Preaching Angle: (1) Courage; Boldness; Temptation; Satan —With a positive take on this story, you could talk about this girl's courage in refusing to give in to intimidation, oppression, or temptation. Sure, it was just a chicken nugget, but this girl refused to be bullied by a force for evil. (2) Temptation; Sin; Addiction—In contrast, a negative take on this story could focus on the girl's inability to let go of a chicken nugget—just like we hold on to our sin.

Anyone who's lived near train tracks knows the hassle and inconvenience a passing train can cause. You're already running late, you're driving up to the track crossing, and then—the barriers start flashing. It's a frustrating feeling.

But imagine if that happened as you were trying to qualify for the Boston Marathon.

That's exactly what happened to more than 100 runners in Pennsylvania, as a train crossed the marathon course—and crossed it very slowly. One runner, who was using the race as his last opportunity to qualify for Boston, said that he "missed his qualifying time by eight minutes."

Race officials had communicated with the railroad line prior to race day, and had received "absolute assurances…that trains would be suspended" during the race. Yet those assurances didn't stop a train from crossing the course's seventh mile.

"The incident is especially regrettable and was quite unexpected," the marathon's account posted on Facebook, noting that those times that were affected would "be addressed on a runner-by-runner basis."

Potential Preaching Angles: We may have a plan laid out for running our best race, and we may have set goals and dreamed dreams, but one truth makes itself abundantly (and sometimes painfully) clear: "In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps" (Prov. 16:9).

One of the greatest Christian leaders of the last century was John R. W. Stott, rector of All Souls Langham Place in London and a peerless preacher, Bible teacher, evangelist, author, global leader and friend to many. I knew him over many decades, but I will never forget my last visit to his bedside three weeks before he died.

After an unforgettable hour and more of sharing many memories over many years, I asked him how he would like me to pray for him. Lying weakly on his back and barely able to speak, he answered in a hoarse whisper, "Pray that I will be faithful to Jesus until my last breath." Would that such a prayer be the passion of our generation too.

A 12-year-old girl accidentally ran a half marathon after signing up for a family-friendly 5K run. LeeAdianez Rodríguez-Espada, a 12-year-old student from New York, was worried she was going to be late when she went to the starting line of her race. She set off with everyone else and started running. But she accidentally left 15 minutes early with a group of people running the half marathon race.

Lee, focused on putting one foot in front of the other, didn't realize until mile four that the finish line was nowhere in sight. Turning to another runner, she asked how much further. "And that's when it struck me I was in the half marathon instead of the 5k," Rodriguez-Espada said. Instead of dropping out, she decided to keep running.

Brendalee Espada, her mother, lost track of her daughter when she went to park the car. When she got to the starting line, her daughter was gone. "She gave me a really big scare," Espada told reporters. She and the police searched for Rodriguez for nearly two hours.

"She just wanted to finish the race," Espada said. "Two hours after I started looking for her, I see that one of the police officers found her. And I see she has a medal." She finished 13.1 and placed 1,885th of 2,111 finishers but she was among the youngest to run the race. Her mom said, "I don't even know how she did it. I'm so proud of her."

Possible Preaching Angles: Does your race seem longer and more difficult than you thought? Maybe this isn't the race you thought you signed up for, but God had something different in mind for your life journey. Fix your eyes on the finish line and keep running for the prize.

Dan McConchie, vice president of government affairs at Americans United for Life, was riding his motorcycle through a suburban intersection when a car came into his lane and pushed him into on-coming traffic. When he woke two weeks later in a Level 1 trauma center, he was a mess. Six broken ribs, deflated left lung, broken clavicle, broken shoulder blade, and five broken vertebrae. Worst of all, amidst all the broken bones, he had a spinal-cord injury that left him a paraplegic. The neurosurgeon told his wife that it would be a "miracle" if he'd ever walk again.

Eight years later Dan is still in a wheelchair.

"What I learned," Dan said, "is that this life isn't for our comfort. Instead, the purpose of this life is that we become conformed to the image of Christ. Unfortunately, that doesn't happen when everything is unicorns and rainbows. It instead happens when life is tough, when we are forced to rely upon God through prayer just to make it through the day. That is when he is most at work in our lives molding us into who he designed us to be."

"My prayers are different today than they were eight years ago. Back then, I looked at God like Santa Claus. I asked him to send nice things my way. Now, I have one prayer that I pray more than any other: 'Lord, may I be able to say at the end of today that I was faithful.'"

In 1975, Salvatore Maddi, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, began to study the long-term impact of stress on employees at the Illinois Bell Telephone Company. It was supposed to be a simple longitudinal study. But in 1981, Congress passed the Telecommunications Competition and Deregulation Act, and the entire industry was disrupted. Within one year, Bell Telephone laid off half its workforce. Those who were left faced uncertainty, changing roles, and increased demands. As Maddi recalls, "One manager told me he had ten different supervisors in one year, and neither he nor they knew what they were supposed to do."

Some employees crashed and burned under the pressure, developing health problems and depression. Other employees thrived, finding a new sense of purpose and enhanced well-being. Because Maddi had been studying these employees for years, he began to search for clues in how they had responded to the stress.

A few things stood out about people who thrived under stress. First, they thought about stress differently. They saw it as a normal aspect of life, and they didn't believe that it was possible or even desirable to have an entirely comfortable, safe life. Instead, they viewed stress as an opportunity to grow. They also believed that difficult times required not isolating oneself. Finally, no matter what the circumstances, these "thrivers" believed we must continue making choices—ones that could change the situation or, if that wasn't possible, that could change how the situation affected them. People who held these attitudes were more likely to take action and to connect with others during stress.

Maddi named this collection of attitudes and coping strategies "hardiness," which he defined as the courage to grow from stress. Since that study of Bell Telephone employees, the benefits of hardiness have been documented across countless circumstances, including military deployment, immigration, living in poverty, battling cancer, and raising a child with autism, as well as in professions ranging from law enforcement and medicine to technology, education, and sports.

Runners will sprint to cross the finish line. College students may throw one last party or rush to check off a list of things to do on campus before they graduate. But when the end draws near some behaviors aren't so beneficial or light-hearted. New research suggests that people are more likely to cheat when they get close to finishing, reports Daniel Yudkin for Scientific American. New research suggests that when faced with a task that has an end, and little chance of being caught, people are more likely to cheat and deceive others to get ahead.

The research team ran a couple of experiments with more than 2,500 people. In a coin-tossing experiment, the participants would guess heads or tails and win a cash prize for each time they got it right. Since the coin toss should be fifty-fifty, the researchers could tell in aggregate if people were more likely to cheat. In early rounds, the percentages of correct guesses lined up with what probability would predict. Few people were cheating. But in later rounds, the results deviated, especially when people neared the end of their designated number of flips.

In an essay-grading test, participants were paid by the time it took to evaluate seven or ten papers. A secret timer logged how long it actually took. Again, the results showed that as people got to the end of their task (the final few papers), they would cheat to gain a greater reward. In this case, they reported spending at least 25 percent more time on the final essay than they actually did.

It is common for runners, and athletes in any endurance sport, to "hit the wall" as they push themselves past their comfort level. Here's how the long distance runner Dick Beardsley described it: "It felt like an elephant had jumped out of a tree onto my shoulders and was making me carry it the rest of the way in."

Hitting the wall is a very real physical condition. Once carbohydrates and hydration are diminished, the body wants to stop. The body burns out of energy and becomes so tired it can't go forward. The day before the Boston Marathon, an article in Harvard Health predicted what would happen to the thousands of runners:

Come tomorrow morning, about 27,000 runners will begin the annual 26-mile, 385-yard (42,195 kilometers) mass run from suburban Hopkinton to Boston. But if past marathons in Boston and elsewhere are any indication, perhaps up to 40 percent of these optimistic and determined souls will slam into a sudden sensation of overwhelming, can't-do-this fatigue several miles (typically about five) before they get a chance to experience the glory of crossing the finish line.

What is true for the body is true for the soul. Spiritually speaking, sometimes we also hit the wall. We feel like an elephant has jumped on our back. We hit that can't-do-this spiritual fatigue. Life is an endurance race, in which we all will at some point "hit the wall" and want to quit.