Poised for VICTORY!

We’re getting close!

Just a couple more days and The Challenge will be over, we’ll have made it through, smiles on our faces and an exceptionally good blogging month in the books. Just as I was thinking that there was no way we’d fail to finish now, having come so far, I came across some comments posted in other blogs that have convinced me not to take these last few days too lightly.

Other less successful challenges loom largely in my mind. The word diet causes me to cringe; reminding me that I seem to start a new one every month because of the weight that I (still!) carry over from the last one. Refusing to focus on failure, I reword my newest attempt as a new eating adventure on the way to a slimmer and healthier version of me. A positive mindset is essential if I’m ever to see victory in the fight against flab, as well as so many other battles in life.

I thought back to my most successful attempt in this area, a season in which I did lose a significant amount of weight in a short period of time, to see what tipped the scales in favor of success. What I found was that the motivation behind the desire to lose weight was significant enough to encourage me to turn down short term pleasures repeatedly in favor of long term joy.

That last word triggers thoughts of a verse in Scripture from a passage of encouragement on likewise finishing our Christian walk well. It advises us to keep our eyes on Jesus as our example of one who “…for the joy [of obtaining the prize] that was set before Him, endured the cross, despising and ignoring the shame, and is now seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:2 AMP). Keeping our eyes on the prize prevents us from being distracted by the smaller pleasures of life we encounter along the way.

That passage in Hebrews offers a few other words of advice to those closing in on victory. It reminds us that we’re surrounded by a crowd of others who have successfully gone before and are now cheering us on. It tells us to travel light; to throw off any unnecessary issues that we tend to get tangled up in and that hold us back from crossing the finish line. And finally it encourages us to be patiently persistent in pushing on to the end.

Whether we make it through the alphabet of not in The Challenge is up to us individually. But thankfully our victory in life has already been won for us by Another; we need merely to walk it out.

Blog on and finish strong in the knowledge that the end is just around the bend.

“Yet amid all these things we are more than conquerors and gain a surpassing victory through Him Who loved us.”
(Romans 8: 37 AMP)