If you lived in the 1700s, it could take a day or more to receive news about tragedies in the next village.
Today, it takes milliseconds to know what is happening in almost any corner of the global village, thanks to this thing called the internet.
The internet has connected virtually every human on the planet to each other. As a consequence, while it once took weeks by ship to send a message across continents in the 1800s, today that very same message needs only seconds to travel across vast oceans.
This movement of information at speeds never seen before has meant that, unlike in the old days, when you were mostly concerned with your immediate family and friends, the internet brings to your attention what people around the globe are doing at any given moment.
You open social media and feel behind in life only because you saw a 20-year-old stranger in a red Ferrari.
You constantly compare your milestones to those of strangers on the internet.
People who don't care about you.
Society makes us think that we're in competition with each other. That to get ahead, you have to step over other people.
And that couldn't be further from the truth.
In 2 Timothy 4:7, Paul writes:
I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.
The implication is that we all have our own race.
Competition assumes that we're all sharing one racetrack with the rest of humanity, and the world will have you think that because it appears to be the case.
But Scripture teaches something different.
The fact is that we each have our own race to run.
And perhaps that's the beautiful part: you don't have to outrun anybody.
You just have to finish.
Your task isn't to beat the person beside you. It's to remain faithful on the course God has placed before you.
Isn't that amazing!
Our task, then, becomes to trust that we're on the right track as long as our hearts stay true to God.
It's true that no man is truly self-made. Every man is, in some way, the result of another person's influence.
We inevitably begin to resemble the people we admire. And those people can influence our paths for good, but equally for worse.
But influence isn't control.
God has still given us responsibility for the lives we live and the choices we make.
It's us who run our race.
Nobody else.
So please don't compare your journey to someone else's.
Someone may be further ahead than you. Someone may have more money, more recognition, more friends, or seemingly have their entire life figured out.
They're not running your race.
Keep your eyes on your own track.
Stay faithful.
And finish.
