On the way to the top of the highest peak in the French Alps there is a small inn. This inn provides rest and respite for mountain climbers. It is called the Mediocre Inn, which in French simply means “halfway.”
"Imagine coming off a day of climbing in the icy, windy French Alps,” says Dr. Jay Strack. “The cold has seeped into your bones. You’re exhausted, and every muscle in your body hurts. At the Mediocre Inn, you find a hot meal and a warm bed. You begin to relax, put your feet up, get comfortable. Who wouldn’t like that? But success is not found in rest and comfort. Success, reaching the top of the mountain, requires going back out into the cold and wind. It requires stretching and straining and working towards the goal.
“About 80% of climbers never go any farther than the Mediocre Inn. Once they’ve had a day or two of rest and comfort, they turn around and descend the mountain, never reaching the Alps’ highest peak. They lose the determination to reach their final goal.” (1)
We’ve all spent time there, haven’t we, in the Mediocre Inn? Not the one in the Alps, perhaps, but we have our own Mediocre Inn. And most of us are not too happy about that. Maybe that’s why heroes are so important to our lives. Maybe that’s why we like hearing about people who pick up where the rest of us leave off and make it the rest of the way to the top of the mountain.
One hero who has captured the attention of our world is cyclist Lance Armstrong. Armstrong overcame such great odds. He not only won his battle against cancer, but this year he won one of sport’s premier showcases of determination and endurance, the Tour de France bicycle race, for a record seventh time. But Armstrong is not alone among determined cyclists. Let me tell you about another man whose dedication equals that of Lance Armstrong. In the 2003 Tour de France, American cyclist Tyler Hamilton suffered a fractured collarbone when another cyclist slid and fell in front of the pack, causing a crash that involved thirty-five other riders. Collarbone injuries are notoriously painful, and they heal slowly because the collarbone cannot be isolated and immobilized by a cast. No one expected Hamilton to return to the race. But the following morning, Tyler Hamilton set out on the next leg of the Tour de France. Against all predictions, he finished the race. How tough was it? According to one report, the pain was so great that he destroyed eleven of his teeth from gritting them so hard. This feat of finishing with a broken collarbone was so unprecedented that competitors demanded proof of Hamilton’s injury. His doctors had to release his X-rays to the newspapers in order to prove that Hamilton really had ridden this grueling race with a broken collarbone. Hamilton explained that he endured the pain by focusing on just completing each day’s journey. (2)
Can you even imagine that? Hurting so bad that he destroyed eleven teeth from gritting them so hard. That reminds me of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane while sweat like great drops of blood rolled off of him. Of course, Jesus was not trying to win a bicycle race. He was winning our souls.
But we read about such determination as Tyler Hamilton’s, and it says to us this is what it takes to be successful in this world, whether you are building a career or a family or a life. Are you willing to give your all?
Then we come to these words of our Lord found in John’s Gospel, “The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” And deep in our bones we realize that Jesus is talking about a way of life that doesn’t stop at the Mediocre Inn.
Most of us would prefer a life of excellence. That’s true, isn’t it? None of us sets out to be less than we could be. We want the very best in our lives. That’s why we thrill to read about people who make it to the top of the mountain. St. Paul’s Cathedral in London is packed with memorials to people who have impacted England in noble way. None of these Brits ever rested in the Mediocre Inn. The oldest memorial is that of poet John Donne, who was Dean of St. Paul’s from 1621 until his death in 1631. He is the author of the beautiful and moving poem, “No Man Is an Island.” There is also a massive memorial to the Duke of Wellington, victor of Waterloo. Upstairs in the main church there is a memorial to General Charles Gordon. The memorial bears this epitaph: “He gave his strength to the weak, his substance to the poor, his sympathy to the suffering, his heart to God.”
Wow! Wouldn’t that be a great epitaph on our tombstones? “He--or she--gave her strength to the weak, her substance to the poor, her sympathy to the suffering, her heart to God.” That’s what we want, isn’t it? We don’t want to live forever in the Mediocre Inn. We want our lives to make a difference. We want to be remembered well by the people who love us. We want to be remembered as people who made a contribution to the community and to the world. Even more important, we want to stand unashamed before God. Most of us would prefer a life of excellence.
That’s one reason we come to worship. We come to be inspired. We want to hear about the heroes of the Bible. We want to hear the challenging words of the prophets and St. Paul. Most of all, we want to hear the words of Jesus--for we know that he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. With his help, we believe we can live an excellent life. So let’s examine these words: “The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me.”
To escape the Mediocre Inn, we need to recognize that it isn’t about us. Jesus calls us to a life of service. Notice these words carefully, “The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me.” If we think that the meaning of life is primarily concerned with our comfort, our happiness, our contentment, we will never heed the summons of the Master to a life of excellence. Life is about service.
Philip Yancey is an outstanding Christian writer who has authored many helpful books. He began his career as a journalist. As a journalist, he interviewed diverse people. Looking back, he divides these diverse people into two types: stars and servants. “The stars include NFL football greats, movie actors, music performers, famous authors, TV personalities, and the like. These are the people who dominate our magazines and our television programs. We fawn over them, poring over the minutiae of their lives: the clothes they wear, the food they eat, the aerobic routines they follow, the people they love, the toothpaste they use.”
Yet Yancey says that, in his limited experience, these “idols” are as miserable a group of people as he has ever met. “Most have troubled or broken marriages. Nearly all are hopelessly dependent on psychotherapy. In a heavy irony, these larger-than-life heroes seem tormented by incurable self-doubt.”
He has also spent time with servants. “People like Dr. Paul Brand, who worked for twenty years among the poorest of the poor, leprosy patients in rural India. Or health workers who left high paying jobs to serve with Mendenhall Ministries in a backwater town of Mississippi. Or relief workers in Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, or other such repositories of world-class human suffering. Or the Ph.D.’s scattered throughout jungles of South America translating the Bible into obscure languages.”
Yancey says he was prepared to honor and admire these servants, to hold them up as inspiring examples. He was not, however, prepared to envy them. But as he now reflects on the two groups side by side, “stars and servants, the servants clearly emerge as the favored ones, the graced ones. They work for low pay, long hours, and no applause, ‘wasting’ their talents and skills among the poor and uneducated. But somehow in the process of losing their lives they have found them. They have received the ‘peace that is not of this world.’”
Yancey goes on to say that when he thinks of the great churches he has visited, “what comes to mind is not an image of a cathedral in Europe. These are mere museums now. Instead, he thinks . . . of an inner-city church in Newark with crumbling plaster and a leaky roof, of a mission church in Santiago, Chile, made of concrete block and corrugated iron.” In these places, set amidst human misery, he says he has seen Christian love abound. (3)
Do you get it? It isn’t about us. Happiness is about finding something bigger than us and giving ourselves to something bigger without reservation. “The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me.”
This is to say that a commitment to excellence begins with a commitment to Christ.
Have you ever made a resolution at New Year’s? How long did it last? You don’t have to raise you hand, but has anyone in this room ever begun a diet? One man says he is on the Pasta diet. He walks “pasta” desserts, pasta breads, pasta pastas, etc. We all know how important it is to set goals for self-improvement and then to work hard to reach those goals. We also know how difficult it is to succeed. Like the 80 percent of hikers who stop at the Mediocre Inn, it is very difficult to reach the top of the mountains we set as our personal bests. What we need is not a new resolution or a new set of goals. What we need is someone to help us along the way. A personal coach. Someone who will challenge us, encourage us, empower us.
That is what happens when we commit our lives to Christ. That is what happens when we pray that we shall have the same mind in us as was in Christ Jesus. We commit our lives to a person and then he gives us our purpose. It might be a lofty purpose such as solving an injustice in society or it may be the more modest but still challenging goal of being a good parent to our children, but it makes a difference in choosing our goals and pursuing our goals when we know Christ is living his life through us.
This is the key to real success in life. It is the key not only to accomplishing our dreams; it is also assurance that when we have accomplished those dreams we will find fulfillment and peace.
A friend once came to Harold Kushner, author of the book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, and said to him: “Two weeks ago, for the first time in my life I went to the funeral of a man my own age. I didn’t know him well, but we worked together, talked to each other from time to time, had kids about the same age. He died suddenly over the weekend. A bunch of us went to the funeral, each of us thinking, ‘It could just as easily have been me.’
“That was two weeks ago. They have already replaced him at the office. I hear his wife is moving out of state to live with her parents. Two weeks ago he was working fifty feet away from me, and now it’s as if he never existed.
“It’s like a rock falling into a pool of water. For a few seconds, it makes ripples in the water, and then the water is the same as it was before, but the rock isn’t there anymore.
“Rabbi, I’ve hardly slept at all since then. I can’t stop thinking that it could happen to me, that one day it will happen to me, and a few days later I will be forgotten as if I had never lived. Shouldn’t a man’s life be more than that?” (4) Philip Yancey interviewed stars and servants. It was the servants he came away not only admiring, but also envying. They had not only escaped the Mediocre Inn, but they had found a joy that the world cannot know. They had given their life to a person and he had given them a purpose. This is the secret to life. “The [person] who loves his life will lose it, while the [person] who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me.”
1. Cited by Pat Williams with David Wimbish, Secrets from the Mountain (Grand Rapids: Fleming H. Revell, 2001), p. 221.
2.John Eliot, Ph.D. Overachievement (New York: Portfolio, 2004), pp. 129-130.
3. Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990).
4. When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, p. 20. Cited by Dr. Mickey Anders, First Christian Church, Pikeville, Kentucky