You Will Never Pass This Way Again

Somebody reaching out — because the difference we make for someone else is the only finish line that lasts.

I have stood on many finish lines.

I remember a young person who came to me years ago simply wanting to get healthy through running. What happened next went so far beyond what either of us expected. The changes weren't just visible — something deeper had shifted. A new sense of discipline. A new way of seeing themselves, one rooted not in how they looked but in who they were becoming. A whole outlook on life, transformed.

I was every bit as proud of that as I've been of any state championship. Maybe more. Because that runner didn't just get faster — they discovered they were capable, that their body and their will could be stewarded well, that showing up for yourself day after day is itself a form of caring for the gift God gave you. Nobody outside our small circle will ever know that story. It will never make a headline. But it mattered every bit as much as the trophies did, and honestly, it's lasted longer.

And here's why: your worth is never tied to a place. Not a place on a results sheet, not a place in a company, not a place in a classroom. A place in any area of life is not your identity. You are loved for who you are, not for what you do.

We've won a bunch of championships over the years, and I'm grateful for each one. But it's the athletes who finished back in the pack, giving everything they had anyway, who taught me the most. Their worth was never sitting in that place number. It never is, for any of us.

And here is what a lot of years of stopwatches and starting guns have taught me: none of it was ever really about the clock.

We spend our lives striving and striving for the bigger house. The better job title. A trophy case. A transcript with nothing but perfect marks on it. One more championship. And I want to be honest here — none of that striving is wasted. Hard work has real value. Excellence honors God and others with the gifts we are given. Building something good, raising a family well, running a program with excellence, finishing a race with everything you had — all of it matters, and none of it should be thrown out.

But it doesn't last forever. And it was never meant to be the point.

You are here for a blink of an eye. That's not pessimism — that's Scripture, and it's math, and it's the plain truth every person who has stood beside a hospital bed already knows. Jesus put it plainly: don't store up your treasure where moth and rust destroy it, where thieves break in and steal — store it up where it lasts. And when your blink is over, no one is going to walk through your house counting trophies. No one is going to ask how big it was, or how many titles you won, or how many things you managed to collect along the way. Those things had value. They just weren't built to be eternal.

What lasts is who you loved. Who did you notice? Who did you help?

The poor. The sick. The outcast who was sitting alone at the end of the lunch table. And — this one sneaks up on people — the 4.0 student that everybody assumes is just fine, the one who smiles and turns in perfect work and never asks for help, quietly buckling under a pressure nobody else can see. Jesus loved that student, too. He loved the ones who looked like they had it all together every bit as much as the ones who obviously didn't.

Two thousand years later, the assignment hasn't changed. Love God. Love others. Everything else — every medal, every deal closed, every ranking, every "like" — is commentary on those two lines. It was true in Nazareth. It's true in the carpool line. It's true at practice this afternoon.

There's an old song that says you'll never pass this way again. I've always believed that line more than the writers probably intended. Today will not come back around. This version of your son, your athlete, your neighbor, your coworker — the one standing in front of you right now — you get exactly one shot at today with them. Not a rehearsal. Not a rough draft.

So here's the whole plan, and it fits on an index card:

Find one person today. It can be small — it's supposed to be small. A word of encouragement to the kid who never hears it. A call to the mother nobody's checked on. A hand on the shoulder of the teammate who finished back in the pack and needs to hear that it didn't change a thing about how much they matter. Make a difference in that one life, on purpose, today.

Then get up tomorrow and do it again.

I'll do the same. Repeat each day.

That's the whole race. Not the ribbon at the end — the mile markers of people you loved along the way. Fifty years from now, nobody will remember your time in the 400. They'll remember whether you saw them.

Go see somebody today.

— Coach Weber Philippians 4:13

Two runners, arms around each other — proof that what we cared for along the way was always the real finish line.