Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best

by Eugene H. Peterson

Jeremiah it is clear that the excellence comes from a life of faith, from being more interested in God than in self, and has almost nothing to do with comfort or esteem or achievement. Here is a person who lived life to the hilt, but there is not a hint of human pride or worldly success or personal achievement in the story. Jeremiah arouses my passion for a full life. At the same time he firmly shuts the door against attempts to achieve it through self-promotion, self-gratification or self-improvement.

As a pastor I encourage others to live at their best and provide guidance in doing it. But how do I do this without inadvertently inciting pride and arrogance? How do I stimulate an appetite for excellence without feeding at the same time a selfish determination to elbow anyone aside who gets in the way?

The cluster of personal names that opens the book of Jeremiah strikes exactly the right note for what is most characteristic of Jeremiah: the personal in contrast to the stereotyped role, the individual in contrast to the blurred crowd, the unique spirit in contrast to generalized cultural moods. The book in which we find this most memorable record of what it means to be human in the fullest, most developed sense, begins with personal names.

Any time that we move from personal names to abstract labels or graphs or statistics, we are less in touch with reality and diminished in our capacity to deal with what is best and at the center of life.

assess my worth in response to how much others want me or don’t want me.

No one is only a product of the genes contributed by parents. Who we are and will be is compounded with who God is and what he does. God’s love and providence and salvation are comprised in the reality of our existence along with our metabolism and blood type and fingerprints.

The before is the root system of the visible now. Our lives cannot be read as newspaper reports on current events; they are unabridged novels with character and plot development, each paragraph essential for mature appreciation.

We enter a world we didn’t create. We grow into a life already provided for us. We arrive in a complex of relationships with other wills and destinies that are already in full operation before we are introduced. If we are going to live appropriately, we must be aware that we are living in the middle of a story that was begun and will be concluded by another. And this other is God.

What is God doing? He is saving; he is rescuing; he is blessing; he is providing; he is judging; he is healing; he is enlightening. There is a spiritual war in progress, an all-out moral battle. There

is evil and cruelty, unhappiness and illness. There is superstition and ignorance, brutality and pain. God is in continuous and energetic battle against all of it. God is for life and against death. God is for love and against hate. God is for hope and against despair. God is for heaven and against hell. There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square foot of space is contested.

“Fear not, provided you fear; but if you fear not, then fear.”5

There is no living the life of faith, whether by prophet or person, without some kind of sustaining vision like this. At some deep level we need to be convinced, and in some way or other we need periodic reminders, that no words are mere words. In particular, God’s words are not mere words. They are promises that lead to fulfillments. God performs what he announces. God does what he says.

Too many of us spend far too much time with the editorial page and not nearly enough with the prophetic vision. We get our interpretation of politics and economics and morals from journalists when we should be getting only information; the meaning of the world is most accurately given to us by God’s Word.

We underestimate God and we overestimate evil. We don’t see what God is doing and conclude that he is doing nothing. We see everything that evil is

doing and think it is in control of everyone.

Jeremiah’s potter shows me what I become as I submit my life to the creative and merciful God. Our lives become the pottery that makes possible the emergence of civilization—what Jeremiah called the “people of God,” what Jesus called the “kingdom of God,” what Augustine called the “city of God.” It is no longer every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. We are containers, “regions of being” in Heiddeger’s words, in which love and salvation and mercy are conserved and shared. Everything is connected and makes sense now—the shape of creation and the shape of salvation, God’s shaping hand and the shape of my life.

What we do in secret determines the soundness of who we are in public. Prayer is the secret work that develops a life that is thoroughly authentic and deeply human.