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One of the finest minds in our country belongs to a man named Charles Merrill. Charles' father founded a company called Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, a rather successful stock brokerage firm. With part of that vast wealth, Charles Merrill founded the Commonwealth School in Boston. The Commonwealth School has enjoyed a tremendous academic reputation. It has excelled in educating students from diverse backgrounds. On a cold, windy day Charles Merrill and a minister friend were walking to lunch, and he told the minister the secret of his success. He said, "I have a rule in my school that every grade must have at least one teacher who was himself or herself a C student in high school. How can someone who has only made A's and B's identify with, educate, and appreciate someone who has to struggle to make a C?" He continued, "It is a dangerous half-truth to believe that we are made great by our superior attributes and ruined by our struggles. All of us have minuses somewhere in life."

We should never forget that wisdom. To be certain, we rightly spend most of our lives trying to avoid or at least downplay our minuses. This is impossible to do because all of us possess some weaknesses. Some of these are obvious, like physical impediments -- too short, too tall, too overweight, too weak. Others are less obvious -- quick temper, shyness, irritable reactions, severe loneliness, insecurity. All our seas are not smooth seas.

The apostle Paul recognized this. As a wise, old, seasoned veteran of life's battles, Paul wrote a letter to a young man named Timothy. He described life in these terms: "It is a fight, and I have fought a good one. It is a hard race to run and still keep your faith. But I have managed to finish that race and still keep my faith. Hence, there is a crown of righteousness waiting for me."

Throughout the Bible, in the lives of so many people, there is the assumption that we can take whatever minuses we have, shoulder them, and with God's help carry them to the very end. The entire Bible chronicles the lives of rather ordinary people who emptied themselves before God and, with God as the center of life, turned their minuses into pluses.

There is a power in this universe that can be a tremendous ally to us. Most of the time we are not aware of it or take it for granted. This power from God is so strong that it can enable us to triumph in spite of our personal and societal weariness.

Certainly ours is a society that can understand weariness, fatigue, and weakness. It's not physical fatigue which lurks as our biggest enemy. To the contrary, we get tired and weak when the conditions surrounding us wear us out. It makes us weary when we contemplate that our foreparents labored for generations for freedom, and we see that racism still exists. Hate crimes still take place. Discrimination remains with us. Young people are still full of despair because joblessness is still here and they can't see a place waiting for them when they finish school. Quite often we tend to embellish our suffering condition and become more weary because we lose contact with our human history.1 We feel cut off and separated. We can't pull back from life and reflect on the power of God. Our dreams become deferred through our failure to recognize the capacity of God to help us turn a minus into a plus. To regain a wholesome view of life we have to connect with where the rubber meets the road in our day-to-day existence.

Consider this. Virtually everything we've touched today is a living example of a minus having been turned into a plus. We woke up and turned on a light bulb. The light bulb was perfected by a deaf man. Next we might have turned on a radio to listen to the news or some music. The radio was invented by a hunchback. If we listened to contemporary music we might have realized that three of the eight most popular artists are blind. If we grabbed a quick bite to eat in a fast-food place or in a supermarket we most likely enjoyed a symphony written by a classical composer who was stone deaf at the time he wrote it. Finally, if we rushed to class or the library to continue this grand pursuit called education, few of us acknowledged that the greatest achievement in higher education was made by a woman born unable to see, unable to hear, and unable to speak.

Virtually everything we touch today was invented or sustained by someone who turned a minus into a plus.

The evidence is before us. Our God is a mighty God. Our world has possibilities. Our faith in God can really make a difference in our lives. How can we reclaim that remarkable understanding?

A keen insight into God's power is this lectionary passage from the book of Isaiah. At the time of its composition the Jewish people were in exile in Babylon. They were forced to live far from their native land. They were a weak people in the midst of one of the most powerful dynasties on earth. Isaiah boldly proclaimed: "Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow tired; they will stand and not faint" (Isaiah 40:31).

Most of us, at first glance, would think that Isaiah has the passage all turned around in his ascending order: first you soar, then you run, and finally you are able to stand and not faint! What is this? The developmental scheme seems all screwed up. Don't we first walk, then run, then finally soar like an eagle? That's normally how we turn a minus into a plus.2 Isn't it?

Isaiah knew God and he knew life. He set down the promises of God in the correct order, for the greatest power and the greatest gift is to keep going when life has slowed us to a walk and we're almost ready to cave in and quit.

God's help is described in three forms. There is the promise that God's help can take the form of ecstasy, enabling us to mount up and soar like eagles. Many times we have felt such joy and celebration in our religious experience. Jesus felt it at the moment when he rode the donkey into Jerusalem as the crowds shouted "Hosanna to the Son of David!" Paul felt it when the scales fell from his eyes and once again when he set foot on European soil. And the women felt it when they gazed into the empty tomb. Sometimes God turns minuses into pluses in a dramatic fashion. It can happen very quickly.

Certainly a quick fix is both a divine and human possibility. A student can receive a C- on a paper and as a record in a teacher's grade book. After a particularly urgent appeal for mercy, the teacher can, with the mere stroke of a pen, put a quick vertical mark through the minus, changing it into a plus. The student goes soaring off, flying out half a letter grade to the good. Now, we know that doesn't happen very often. Minuses aren't that quickly eliminated. God is not solely the one who comes barging into our lives with a ballpoint pen, altering the transcript of experience with a quick vertical mark. Sometimes God does -- but apparently not very often.

So, Isaiah describes a second way God helps us turn minuses into pluses: "They shall run and not be weary." God gives us strength for activism. God gives us the inspiration to act, to reach out and do a task or solve a problem. We can witness the indefatigable spirit of Jesus as he healed, touched, and spoke to countless thousands of people. All of us have prayed to God and found the motivation and power to get busy with life. We've overcome loneliness through finding purpose in terms of new friends, a club or sorority to belong to; we've found the strength to study harder, to write longer and better papers; we've discovered the commitment to get up and go to church, walk in CROP walks, build Habitat for Humanity homes, and stand for justice. We've found the motivation to run an extra lap, jump a little higher, and pound a little harder. Thank God for the power to run and not be weary, to institute effective church programs and activities.

But, Isaiah is right. There's more power available to us than soaring and running. There are some problems, some deficiencies, some minuses that cannot be attacked by force or energy. Sometimes we can't soar and we can't run.

But fortunately there is another way in which God can help us turn a minus into a plus. "They shall walk and not faint." Now when we seek the spectacular that may not sound like much. Who wants to walk, to barely creep along inch by inch, barely above the threshold of existence, not fainting? That doesn't sound like much of a religious experience, does it? But, friends, most of our decisions in life are made when there is no occasion to soar and no place to run, and when all we can do is trudge along and hear that help is available. When there is a power that enables us to walk and not faint, that is, indeed, good news. It ministers to our greatest difficulty: being able to endure, to be patient, and not to give way to heading in another direction. From the flight to Egypt as a baby, to his night in Gethsemane, to his trial before Herod, to his march with the cross to his crucifixion, the greatest power available to Jesus was the power to hang in there, to walk and not faint, to cling to his situation and not abandon his task.

John Mortimer was an English barrister. He became a great writer. His autobiography possessed a catchy title. He called it Clinging to the Wreckage. He asked a yachtsman if sailing the ocean was dangerous. The man replied that it was not if you never learn to swim. He explained: "When you're in a spot of trouble, if you can swim you try to strike out for the shore. You invariably drown. As I can't swim, I cling to the wreckage and they send a helicopter out for me. That's my tip, if you ever find yourself in trouble, cling to the wreckage."

That is one of the most crucial lessons in life: the ability to learn how to start with what you have and build from that, instead of abandoning what you have and swimming for the beautiful shores of already-established activity and superficial soaring. Every existence has its small share of special feelings and bonding moments. Sometimes they seem very remote. But they form a more solid trajectory for the future than the non-experiences of the already-established silver platter. If we've never learned to "walk and not faint," we have never developed resourcefulness and leadership. A sailor who has never sailed in rough seas is never a true sailor.

A Harvard faculty member was asked to address a high school honors class about the secret of his academic success. Surprisingly, he told them his greatest achievement by far was his ability to make a D in French each semester of his freshman year in college. That's the accomplishment of which he was proudest. He prayed a great deal that year about his educational efforts. Some of his prayers were naive and some were quite reasoned and sincere. A few were, perhaps, arrogant.

He soared in history with an A. He ran through freshman English with a B, but in foreign languages he almost fainted. That was his real weakness. He had failed French in high school. He was in way over his head with students more adept in language skills. His roommate dropped the course, and later just dropped out of school completely. Inch by inch this man crept along. And he passed. He hung in there. The teacher even wrote "congratulations" on his final exam, which was also a D. That French teacher became his best friend as a teacher. Twenty-six years later as he stood before those honor students, the professor remarked that half the best friends he had on the face of this earth had also been in that French class. What if he had quit?

Some years ago, an American had a series of unique opportunities. In one six-month span he spent an evening with the new secretary of state of Belgium, spent eight days with the United States permanent ambassador to NATO in the embassy residence in Brussels, ate supper with the Supreme Commander of all NATO armed forces, and entertained the Cultural Minister of the People's Republic of China during his first trip to the United States. To each of these knowledgeable people he posed a question: "What do you perceive to be the most prevalent weakness in this generation of Americans?"

To his surprise, each person in various forms pointed to the same thing. The perceived weakness was an inability to tough things out, to hang in there and produce when everything isn't handed to us immediately on a silver platter. The American pioneer spirit of making a plus out of a minus, holding on to the fight, seems to have given way to impulsive grabbing of that which already exists. In other words, it is a loss of the ability to call on the power of God which enables us to walk and not faint.3

Let us soar when we can. Let us run, and work, and play. Let us thank God for our great activism. May God always give us the ability to run and not be weary. But above all, let us, "Hang in there. Walk and not faint." Our God is a mighty God. There's a power available to us that can sustain us. So be it!
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1. J. Alfred Smith, Basic Bible Sermons on Christian Stewardship (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1992), p. 99.

2. I'm grateful to John Claypool, Tracks of a Fellow Struggler (Waco: Word, 1974), p. 56, for recognition of the proper sequence inherent in the Isaiah passage.

3. This illustration and portions of the sermon may be found in Harold C. Warlick, Jr., The Rarest Of These Is Hope (Lima, Ohio: CSS Publishing Company, 1985), pp. 93-97.