My high school track coach was of the opinion that the defining characteristic of a good runner was not physical agility but mental focus. His most severe critique was not of a runner’s time but their form. Get the form right, and the times will follow. I’m way past my running prime, but I’ve found that admonition holds true in a lot more than just athletic competition.
All these years later, I can still hear Coach Hunt admonishing us. “Don’t look at the track, your feet will find it. Don’t look back; there’s nothing there to care about! Keep those eyes forward! That’s where you’re going!”
We all have an almost irresistible desire to look backward.
When running, the urge is to see how close the nearest competitor is. But, as Coach Hunt would tell us, if we were running flat out and to the best of our ability… that knowledge was useless. Worse, your feet tend to follow your gaze, leading to stumbles and falls.
Keep your eyes fixed on the finish line. As the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews noted, Jesus endured the cross because of the joy that was set before Him. This is a good reminder in our own race!
Yet many of us get drawn into looking backward because we fear that where we are—and where we are going—won’t be nearly as good. We romanticize the past even while paying lip service to the joy we are told awaits us in the future.
This is nothing new. Think of the people of God being led out of actual slavery and bondage. God delivered them from their captors, leading them by a miraculous pillar of fire and smoke. Their enemies had been destroyed by crashing waves. And, rather than have them forage for food while on the run, God provided daily for their dietary needs with bread literally from heaven.
The human heart is nothing if not prone to complaint. So, they grumbled about this lack of variety to the point of romanticizing their time in slavery! In Numbers 11, they said, “We remember the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.”
Yeah… It had cost nothing… except liberty.
The past is never as great as we remember. But even that thought fails to recognize a simple, inescapable truth: the past is the past. What counts today is what we are striving for tomorrow.
In running and life, we look backward at our peril. The past can be useful for reflection and education, but it is not a destination. As a self-governing people, we must set our eyes and our action on the future.