1—2025
There's no traffic jam on the second mile.
Lesson one for the year 2025: Go the second mile. And, yes, don’t worry: You won’t find a traffic jam there at all. Promise!
Yes, it’s a tough one, but we might as well start tough while we’re fresh.
About a decade ago, I heard the great motivational speaker Zig Ziglar tell a memorable story with a powerful lesson. He spoke at Dallas’ Reunion Arena in front of several thousand motivation enthusiasts, including a group of students whom I had taken to hear the iconic speaker. I’ll never forget how Mr. Ziglar owned the stage that day, bouncing around with the vigor of a teenager, telling story after story about his life experiences. This story was from when he was a boy after his family had just moved from Alabama to rural Mississippi. One day when he was about 10, his mama told him to go outside and hoe the garden.
He grabbed the hoe and did as he was told, without complaint. After about half an hour–maybe she had been watching him from the window–she came out to inspect his work. He described the sad scene with the classic Zig Ziglar chuckle:
“I knew the inspection wasn’t going to go the way I wanted,” he laughed, “just by the way my mama was walking on the way out there. Whenever I did a shabby job of something, she’d always put her hands behind her back as she walked; and she’d shake her head the whole way.”
Sure enough, that day she threw her hands behind her and shook her head before taking ten steps toward the garden. Things did not look up for Zig once she got sight of his work, either. She took one look at the halfway-tilled garden, grimaced, and with a scowl, said,
“Son, you’ve got to lick this calf again.”
He knew what it meant, but he still protested.
“What do you mean, Mama?”
“I mean you’ve got to do this job again. You can do better than that.”
“But, Mama,” Zig protested again, “most mamas don’t make their sons do any better job than this!”
“That may be,” snapped his mama, “but you’re not ‘most mamas’ son.”
With that, she turned and walked away from the garden just as she had walked out.
For the record, the son of this particular Mississippi mama sweated a good while longer in the garden that day, licking that calf again.
I immediately thought of this story early in this year’s Bible reading. On January 6, I came to the last half of Matthew 5, the part I would call “The Second-mile religion.”
Or, put another way, it’s the religion where we live at a “higher standard.”
What Jesus does here is say this: You’ve heard certain things your whole life. You’ve heard that you should give an eye for an eye. Scratch that—If somebody slaps you, turn the other cheek. You’ve heard that you should go two miles instead if a Roman soldier tells you to carry his gear for a mile—which was required by Roman law.
Then, the Lord says it is not enough to love your neighbor; love your enemies, too. Jesus says, "If you’re only kind to your friends, then how are we different from everybody else?"
I will say that it is not extremely difficult to write those words, but I have found ever since I first started walking on that red clay dirt a long time ago as a boy that living such words are about as difficult of a thing that you’ll ever try to do. Loving your enemies doesn’t come naturally. It’s unnatural. I don’t know how to do that. I know this, left just to me and my human makeup, I cannot do that. Impossible.
But some things have to come from the Holy Spirit. We have to submit to His power. As Paul says, we are not controlled by the flesh but by the Spirit, “if you have the Spirit of God living in you” (Romans 8:9).
We’ll say it this way:
Left to me, I’ll drop that Roman soldier’s gear two inches past the one-mile marker, and
say, “There you are. You happy, buddy?”
Led by the Spirit, I’ll shake my head and say, “Come on, sir, we’ve got another mile to go. By the way, did I tell you the story about the time that I…”
Bible Reading: January 5 - 11
Genesis 1 - 26
Matthew 1 - 8
Psalm 1 - 10
Proverbs 1 - 3:8
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