What I learned from the Enduro

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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