Running the long race

For five summers in a row during the previous decade, I attended the Jamey Aebersold Jazz Improvisation Workshop, held on the University of Louisville campus. It's a weeklong event. On Sunday afternoon, once you get settled in your dorm room, you take a theory test and audition in front of the faculty members who play your instrument. On the basis of how you do on those, the organizers know where to place you so as to get the most out of your week.

The days consist of breakfast, ear training, theory class, practice with a combo into which you're placed, lunch, master class with one of the teachers who plays your instrument, and another combo rehearsal session. (The upshot of the combo practices is a recital by each combo on Friday afternoon. By that time, there's lots of bonding with you bandmates, vows to stay in touch, and that feeling that you have something that no one can take away.) There are faculty concerts during lunch and in the evenings after dinner.

There's a phenomenon that attendees talk about that takes place on the Tuesday evening of the week. I experienced it bad the first couple of years. It's the feeling that you just want to pack everything into your car and head home. You're surrounded by all this exquisite refinement, this musical excellence, and the feeling that you're never going to measure up overwhelms you. You just have to ride it out. That's how you get to the Friday afternoon sense that you're holding a gem of great price.

I'd like to talk to some other Christians who came to their faith walks later in life about whether they've ever experienced a Tuesday-evening syndrome, so to speak.

As my understanding, and more importantly, experience, of who and what Jesus is deepens, I sometimes get this nagging feeling that I'm a phony. I start thinking, who am I kidding? I'm jiving myself and everyone else, and God, who can't be jived, knows it.

I haven't really analyzed what brings the feeling on. I think it may be when I allow worry, anger or temptation to encroach on my thought process, but I'm also inclined to think it happens when I profess my faith. Sometimes my words ring hollow, even when I talk a good game.

I guess that's at least an aspect of what the apostle Paul means by perseverance. You come to a point at which you know too much to go back. You indisputably have had your moments of really letting it in. You've gazed squarely at the bloody and shredded Lord on the cross and been overcome with gratitude. But you can't sustain it. You easily revert to the plain old you that you've always been.

Something I noticed about the second year of the jazz workshop was that the impact of the Tuesday-evening syndrome was considerably less. In retrospect, I can see that was because I'd already been through the whole week once, and I knew how it concluded.

I get occasional glimpses of that with regard to my faith walk. I never completely give up, because I've seen enough hints of how this journey turns out to compel me to hang in there.

One such hint is the unflinching confidence that one who came before me had, and if anybody had reason to waver, it would have been him. Therefore, I can take it to the bank when he says

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and wsin which clings so closely, and xlet us run ywith endurance the race that is zset before us.

If we can stick with it and deepen our commitment, there will be a sunlit day when we're high-fiving each other and our instructor says, "You cats did great!"