Issue 274
Everybody travels; from moment one of your life, till your eyes close in death, you are on a journey. Your journey will include family experiences, health matters, and holiday pleasures, but for many, and probably most reading this, the largest consumer of your energy is the work journey, whether you get paid or not.
So how do you travel well? This series has attempted to give you an expansive tool kit for your mind, your emotions, and your actions; there is no better way to end than to look at the road to the Cross.
All these roads do not lead to Rome, but to the Cross, and it is the Cross where the work of all works took place. It is here where Jesus shows you how to meet stress with prayer and forgiveness; how to be good news to the person right next to you; how to be involved in the momentous but being present in the moment with John and Mary thus demonstrating the balanced life; how to stand alone for what is right; how to be who you are – authentic, human, suffering; how to finish all things well and how to stay spiritually vibrant whilst extremely busy. This is the foundation of WorkTalk and all that we stand for. So how do you draw strength on the road to the cross? The anonymous writer to the Hebrews (who I suspect was Priscilla, a female writer) gives us some sublime insight.
“Fix your eyes on Jesus” is the cry; every day, every task, every journey, needs to be hallmarked by this; watch what he did, how he did it, and then copy.
To do this you will need to keep ditching stuff that gets in the way. “Everything that hinders” has to go along with “entangling sin”, otherwise you can’t move. You are probably aware of some of your stuff and sin already.
Perseverance is the name of the game – this is not a sprint it’s a Marathon, but the start (“The Author”) and the finish (“Perfecter”) is all about Jesus – not what would he do but what he did do and what he has done; and what he did was to endure the Cross and scorn its shame for one reason alone – “the joy set before Him”.
And now you have the gold: this race on these roads includes struggle, hardship, stress and strain but the overriding characteristic is joy. Joy is that deep sense of meaning, purpose, exhilaration and satisfaction that emerges out of the simple profound fact of being right – and he has made it right.
So you can learn to manage well, plan well, make money well, manage stress well, create teams well, be a maverick well, stir up trouble well and do a million other things well.
The road to the cross is the hardest, most demanding, expensive, complex and well built road that there is.
But as we now know – in the end you get what he paid for.
Hebrews 12:1-4
1Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. 2Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. 3Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. 4In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.
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Work well
Geoff Shattock
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