Thanks
to some nice people who bought and built a car for me, I got to
drive in this
year’s Enduro race at the Estevan Motor Speedway. What is an Enduro, you ask? Basically, you take an old
street car, remove
the windows, move the gas tank and race for 150 laps or an hour
and a half,
whichever comes first.
As
the
race began, I was feeling good. I
passed
a lot of cars and thought that I might even have a chance to win. Then it happened. Coming off corner two, the
car suddenly lost
power. It was still
running. I still had the
gas pedal mashed to the
floor, but it was slowing down. Then
I
looked at the temperature gauge and noticed that it was right at
the top. The car was
overheating.
In order to keep
speeds down a
bit, the track is heavily watered and very muddy, so I assumed
that my radiator
was clogged with mud. I
pulled into the
infield and asked one of the track workers to have a look and he
said, “It is
completely clean”.
Turns out, the car
was
overheating simply because it was working too hard. It was not designed to run
at full throttle
while plowing through deep, sticky mud.
After the engine cooled off, it started running better and
I was back in
the race (Until I totalled the car off on lap 40, but that is
another article
for another time).
Sometimes I feel
like that overheating
enduro car. When I fill my
calendar with
too much work and too little rest, it catches up to me. Doing as much as we can as
fast as we can may
seem like a good idea, but it is counter-productive. We were not designed to live
at a full
throttle. If we are going
to survive
and hang in there for the long haul, we need to learn to slow down
and relax
once in a while. More than
that, we need
to know that God is in control and trust him to look after us.
You have a choice: You can go fast, or you can
go far. You likely cannot
do both.
“Be still and know
that I am
God!” (Psalm 46:10).
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